Madman's Library

[JET73L]

How To Fix Things
"With only duct tape, a hammer and nails, a can of mechanical lubricant, and a wrench, you can fix anything (including things that are only metaphorically broken)! (How To Fix Things Ltd. not responsible for injury [fatal or otherwise], imprisonment, eternal damnation, destruction of the universe, faster-than-light-speed, loss of book, loss of library priveleges, fictional characters coming to life, eternal salvation, phobias of duct tape, chiroptophobia, papercuts, or destruction of any other universe except where expressly stated to be the intended result of the fix.)"
Self-explanatory, though one intern did get two of the pages stuck together when he was fixing a leak in the ceiling and somehow turned the Encyclopaedia And World Books wing a uniform shade of pale orange. Since then, the book has been reclassified as restricted with limited testing availability.
The publishing information page of this book has been ripped out, and the section on how to fix missing pages has, in fact, gone missing.

How Not To Fix Things
A book that looks like a how-to book on the subject you most need at the moment you find it. It causes people to become incredibly inept at any project for which the book is used as a reference guide while refusing to stop until the project is "complete" (usually adding at least two more projects to be completed in te process).
The book is identifiable as itself by the title always remaining the same on the Publishing Information page.

[Zotar]

Addictionary

A dictionary of foreign addictive substances, and the consequences of taking them. The pages give off a fume of some euphoric substance that a reader will get addicted to after just one sitting.

Withdrawal symptoms include dizziness, nausea, and an apparent lack of ability to read any other books.



The Plot Hook

A practical guide to making stories interesting. Readers will frequently get "hooked" on this book even though no foreign substance has been found upon it.

Withdrawal symptoms include dizziness, minor headaches, disorientation, and an apparent lack of attention span.

[JET73L]

Thesaurus
A seemingly normal thesaurus, but with no publisher's or compiler's name in the title to identify it. If a person reads this, the words and synonyms that they read are randomly switched for one another as the person speaks without regards for context. It is surmised that one who reads the entire book will be nearly impossible to understand.
Not to be confused with The Saurus.

[Zotar]

Everything I Ever Wanted is Still Out There: The Biography of a Dragon

A dragon obviously got bored with is hoard of plundered treasures and decided to write his life story spanning 300 hundred years. The book is immensely think and heavy and large enough that it takes 10 people to move it, and at least three people to turn a single page. The book details this dragon's many exploits and accomplishments, and there are vast detailed lists and descriptions of every single treasure he has ever acquired. (Yes, the dragon had enough time to count it all.) It is estimated that the book itself took at least 10 years to write. It takes at least half that long to finish reading it.

It isn't even boring. The dragon was a natural storyteller.

The problem is that the dragon had second thoughts about allowing the book describing his vast treasures to be read by greedy treasure hunters. So the dragon placed a magical curse on the book. If even a shadow of a covetous thought crosses the mind of the reader, the enormous book will snap shut, with the intent of seriously injuring that reader.

[JET73L]

The Catalogue
An immense book, its listing states that it contains the publishing information, description, and locvation of every book in the Library, and updates automatically. It would be incredibly useful, if it opened for anyone but the original Master of the Library.

Readers Digest[sic]
A(nother) cruel prank book, this one a small, somewhat thick periodical. They are scattered amongst a collection of Reader's Digest back issues (unenchanted except for an immunity to chemical damage), and sprays a corrosive, flesh-dissolving liquid onto the hands of the person holding it, and anything that happens to be in front of the open pages.

[Zotar]

Wait. What?

No one can say for sure exactly what the maker of this book wanted to accomplish, the contents are quite misleading. It can do several things. It can form phrases, or metaphors that make very little sense in a given context, or it can describe a very confusing moment in great but distorted detail leaving the reader even more confused about said experience. It can give you the answers to a mathematical process without aptly explaining how it came to that answer, it can describe obscure or complicated scientific theories in a way that a child might possibly grasp the concepts, but everyone else is left confused.

It has illustrations that seem to appear as something different to every viewer even though the picture has undergone no physical change.

It would seem that readers of this book gain a bonus to their intelligence as any prolonged attempt to process the information inside seems to alter their mental capacity considerably.

The book's contents become more incomprehensible with each successive reading.

If a reader attempts to explain something within the book to another reader the book is happy to oblige, changing its current contents to be "less than helpful".

The book also seems to have the ability to reverse-brainwash readers.



Oh, I See!

A book guaranteed to dispel any confusion the reader might have about a given subject.

Downside: Given subjects have little relevance to subjects covered by Wait. What?. It says so on the cover. (Which gives us a clue about what subjects Wait. What? DOES cover.)

Another downside: The facts within are not completely factual.

[JET73L]

Famous In-ventions Throughout History
This book is in three sections: The first is inventions that simply would not have worked, which have explanations of why they could not work. The second section is on inventions that were unfinished, and would have worked had they been completed. This section details a finished prototype, and a short illustration of how life at the start of the twenty-first century might be different if it was completed. The last section is much shorter than the others, explaining a world in which the inventions in the second section had been completed (aside from those that would be made completely redundant or irrelevant by previous inventions).
The contents are explicitly stated to not be a comprehensuve guide, but rather the amount of information that could reasonably be expected to fit in a "normal" equivalent to such a book.

[Zotar]

The Story Behind You

The pages of this book are completely blank. But when open, the text that would be upon the pages, appears behind the head of the person holding onto the book. The text appears to be scrolling on a floating holograph screen. Whenever the would-be-reader turns his head to read the text, it moves, so as to stay just out of the possessor's field of vision. You may not read it, but others can.

To others not actually holding the book, the book is an inside look into the possessor's thoughts and intentions.

If you were to open it, it would allow others to literally read you like a book, while you still have not idea what the text is saying about you, unless someone tells you.

[JET73L]

The Encyclopedia Omnium
A (single-volume) book that has information on whatever subject, object, or place the spine or top of the spine is facing, as well as the outer-level thoughts of the subject in question. If a square of thin, reflective material (such as smooth aluminum foil) is placed in the book and flattened against a certain page, it acts as a sort of "video camera screen" that allows the reader to see it as a sort of window into the "real" image of what is behind it (ghosts, invisible things, inner selves).

[Zotar]

The New Strong's Expanded Exhaustive Concordance of The Bible: Red Letter Edition

A gift from a friend at Church but I thought it deserved an honorable mention in Madman's Library, for I must be a madman to possess such a book.

If a Dictionary and a Bible got married and had a baby, this book would be that baby.

This book enables the reader to locate any scripture passage in the King James Version, as well as every Hebrew or Greek word behind the English words. It includes A Hebrew dictionary and a Greek dictionary.

Suddenly the book Reference THIS! has a real-life equivalent.

It's funny that they should put the word "Exhaustive" in the title...