JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1401

This is another in a series on fantastically-titled books and pamphlets.  When written the titles were aptly descriptive, indicating their contents, selling the wares, so on–but now, with a little time between publication and now, the connections of the titles to the contents seem to have withered like dried toothy neurons, gainfully displayed for all to see in their isolated weird elegance. 

And so we experience the found, unintentional absurd in printed material like some of the examples below.  Their title pages can be experienced as art in a way, at least today, so far removed from their original meaning and context that the words float like disembodied arks of meaning looking for whatever piece of land/meaning that they bump into.  Sometimes their titles are the bizarre-ity, masking a mundane, pedestrian contents; much of the time the title and contents emanate the stench of lost meaning through and through. Sometimes the titles are just nothing.