The Uncyclopedia

From Publishers Weekly
Haigh—"one of the world’s leading cricket writers," according to his publisher—is branching out and clearly aiming at the Schott’s Original Miscellany market with this collection of wide-ranging tidbits of information. If you have an insatiable appetite for trivia (or a need for new bathroom reading), you can check out the 30 songs with the word "radio" in the title or the world’s biggest employers. (No surprise, Wal-Mart is #1, but the next biggest isn’t McDonald’s; it’s China National Petroleum.) There doesn’t seem to be much rhyme or reason to what is included here: some entries are as strange and uncategorizable as "Said of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart" (about whom, no doubt, a great many things were said) and as "Catchphrases from The Goon Show." And if you really needed a list of National Book Award winners, you could find it on the Web. But with this small volume at hand, the next time you need the measurements of a king-size bed, you’ll be well prepared.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The Age [Australia]
"The Uncyclopedia is a random compilation of lists and out-of-the-way information."

Book Description
Make way for this defiantly idiosyncratic, hilariously illuminating compendium of curiosities you never knew you wanted to know! How do you flirt in Turkish? How do you dump someone in Japanese? What are the names of all the animals ever sent into space? These are just some of the fun and insightful oddities that made Gideon Haigh's The Uncyclopedia a hit overseas. The first ever encyclopedia for the curious, The Uncyclopedia is a compendium of illuminating knowledge and a delight for all inquisitive readers. As proved by Schott's Original Miscellany and the enormous rise in popularity of quiz and trivia nights, arcane knowledge and non-essential facts have never been so popular. At last in one convenient volume, everything for knowledge-hungry readers: --Lists of Norse gods
--Suicide notes of the famous
--All anyone needs to know about ?
--How to toast in 10 languages
--A list of all the men to walk on the moon
--Twenty Latin mottoes
--Fortune-telling techniques Neither trivial nor essential, yet always engaging and illuminating, The Uncyclopedia is the reference book referred to purely for the purposes of amusement -- and readers just can't put it down!

About the Author
Gideon Haigh lives in Melbourne, Australia.


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In lieu of a conventional introduction, preface, foreword, or acknowledgments, this quirky compendium begins with equally quirky examples of such. An Australian journalist-cum-cat fancier includes such eclectic tidbits as songs containing "radio" in the title, a list of the US vice-presidents, Yiddish putdowns, Elvis Presley statistics, instructions for making an origami swan, and presidential anagrams (e.g, "He Bugs Gore" for George Bush). Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR


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