The Weirdest Bookshop In The World Quiz

Answer: The Taming Of The Shoe

I asked the bookstore owner if he could give me some information about Spearshake but all he said was "Yeah, he was an author." Some of the other plays on the shelf were "Spamlet", " Eleventh Night" and "As You Don't Like It, Don't Buy It!"

"The Taming Of The Shrew", by William Shakespeare, was first published circa 1590. It features the characters Petruchio and Katherine (the Shrew) in possibly the world's first screwball comedy. Well sort of. The other Shakespeare titles I mangled are "Romeo And Juliet", "A Midsummer Night's Dream", "Julius Caesar", "Hamlet", "Twelfth Night" and "As You Like It".

Answer: Oliver Twists!

"What's the story with all these weird books you have here?", I asked the owner.
"You don't honestly expect me to know the story of every single book do you?", he replied rather testily. "If you want to know the story, read the damn books yourself!"

Fair enough I suppose. At least there was a mini-bio about Dahl's Chickens on the back cover. He was the son of a poultry farmer, also called Dahl, and studied Husbandry with his wife, who herself studied Midwifery with her husband. They had two children, three of whom went on to create a fourth. Chickens died in 1968. His wife died next door, in 1969. Room 1970 was where the hotel had the memorial service.

"Oliver Twist" by Charles Dickens is a perennial favourite although one wonders how many of us were first introduced to the story through watching the big hearted, big budget 1968 Oscar winning musical adaptation, "Oliver!" (without the Twist). In either case, it has a feisty young hero and perhaps Dickens' most evil villain, Bill Sikes. Other Dickens titles I seem to have ruined are "A Tale Of Two Cities", "The Old Curiosity Shop", "A Christmas Carol", "David Copperfield", "Dombey and Son", and "Nicholas Nickleby". Sun Records was where Elvis got his big break. A Nickelodeon is an early model jukebox. "The Twist" was a silly 1960s dance, "The Zorba" an even sillier one popularised in an Anthony Quinn movie. Mister Micawber is one of the good guys in "David Copperfield". And Dahl, as in Dahl's Chickens, is my attempt at a sly nod to Roald Dahl, the children's literature maestro.

Answer: Al And Some Dentures In Wonderland

The blurb went on to list several more spurious Carol Lewis titles including a long nonsense poem featuring a beaver called "The Shunting of the Ark", and "Al Threw The Looking Glass (And It Smashed Into Pieces)" containing the poem "Wabberjocky". Meanwhile, the proprietor was trying to hammer a nail on a broken table leg with another nail.
"Why don't you use a hammer?", I asked him.
"Are you still here?", he replied. "Can't you see I'm busy? Why don't you go to a library, I'm sure they have books there!"

"Alice's Adventures In Wonderland" by Lewis Carroll is unquestionably one of those kid's books that in many ways appeal more to adults. Superb dialogue, amazing birds, beasts and humans of all kinds, a heroine who won't take any nonsense from the nonsensical characters around her and a sense of logical illogic or illogical logic running all the way through, it's timeless, very funny and truly a masterpiece. The original drawings by John Tenniel are still the best. Published in 1865, it's never been out of print. Other Lewis Carroll titles I slightly altered are "Through The Looking Glass (And What Alice Found There)", the 1871 sequel to "Wonderland" with its famous poem "Jabberwocky", and "The Hunting Of The Snark", a looooong nonsense poem about a diverse group of characters searching for a mythical beast. I also semi-referenced "The Wind In The Willows" by Kenneth Grahame and "The Secret Garden" by Frances Hodgson Burnett. Oh, and for those who may not know, a Looking Glass is an old fashioned term for a mirror.

Answer: The Ketchup On The Pie

Well there was no way I could leave now. Even if I refused to buy any of the non-books, I was warming to the idea of hanging around to check more titles and to observe the behavior of the proprietor. "Ketchup On The Pie, huh? Tell me, does this book sell many copies?", I asked.
"Books don't sell copies. Only the staff can sell them. What are you, an idiot or something? Books selling copies, how ridiculous! Are you gonna buy something or not?" And so with those charmingly direct words, I made my way over to the next bookshelf, tripping over a barrel full of monkeys and a pudding with a proof in it on the way.

"The Catcher In The Rye" by J.D. Salinger is one of the great 'disaffected youth' stories. Its protagonist, Holden Caulfield, is depressed, cynical and abhors phoniness of all kinds. The novel is written from his point of view and some of his observations of late 1940's society can easily apply to our own era. Keep the expression "The more things change, the more they stay the same" in the back of your mind when reading this. I won't go into any detail about the John Lennon connection, far too painful to recall. The other three titles I alluded to are "The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald, "East Of Eden" by John Steinbeck and "The Shrinking Man" by Richard Matheson, which was adapted for the movies as "The Incredible Shrinking Man". I cheated a bit by using the latter title because an incredible shrinking 'flan' outfunnies a mere shrinking one anyday!

Answer: Riding Little Red's Hood

"These pages are all blank," I dared to utter to the owner, "except for an 'I Hate Books' stamp."
"Yes, well, it's Minimalist storytelling. That copy of the Jim's is $1,000 by the way. It's signed by the author. Admittedly in another book in another bookshop of mine but it's signed nonetheless. When are you leaving? I've got a new load of books I need to stamp and I don't want to be disturbed."
"You're already disturbed! I think I'll keep looking around. Where's your non fiction?"
"Downstairs in the belfry."
"Don't you mean upstairs?"
"Ordinarily yes, but I could only afford the cheapest of architects, one who had visual/spatial problems. So the belfry's downstairs and the cellar's upstairs. Are you buying the Jim's?"
I didn't bother answering and instead walked towards the stairs, wondering what possible madness lay ahead.

Just as the Beatles' self titled album has always been called "The White Album"(plain white cover design), the anthology of collected folk tales originally called "Children's And Household Tales" (in the original German language version "Kinder und Hausmarchen"), is better known as Grimm's Fairy Tales in honour of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, the brothers who had spent time collecting them and who had them first published in 1812. All those classic tales we got told as kids and which we tell to our kids and that they go on to tell their kids, they were all in this collection, only not so diluted and therefore much, much scarier. Grim indeed! "Little Red Riding Hood", "Cinderella", the list is endless.

Minimalist literature has no definitive meaning attached, it can be all things to all people, but as a general rule the prose is simple, short and the message not entirely clear. The reader needs to fill in the gaps. As to "Seabiscuit" it's a film about a real life champion racehorse of the same name. "National Beauty" is really "Black Beauty" by Anna Sewell and "Black Velvet" is really "National Velvet" by Enid Bagnold, two more stories about horses. Jim Carrey needs no explanation but I often wish someone would explain him. Palindromes are words spelt the same backwards and forwards, such as Anna, and anagrams are words formed from the letters of another word, such as Alex/axle. P.S The names and ages of my two daughters have been changed to protect me from being beaten up by Anna.

Answer: The History Of The Decline And Fall Of The Gibbon Empire

I pretty much left the belfry immediately. It was spooky in there and I was getting tired of the bat's non stop diatribe against not only Dracula movies but the implausibilities in the various Batman adaptations as well. I suppose it had a right to take it all personally, but hearing things like, "Whoever heard of a Batmobile?" and "Where the hell's Transylvania anyway?!" repeated over and over again affected my concentration. So I went back to the ground floor, felt totally unfazed by the sight of the owner trying to put a dog leash on a cockroach, and searched for the Poetry section.

"The History Of The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire" by Edward Gibbon is a six volume chronicle which has been used as a template by subsequent historians, a blueprint on how to write such histories. Gibbon tries to prove that Christianity, among other things, played a big part in the decline and this has caused controversy and heated debate to this day. Interestingly, the first volume was published in 1776, the year of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in America and not long after Captain Cook first set foot in Australia, and the last volume in 1789, the year of the storming of the Bastille in France which led to the French Revolution. They were tumultous times, just like the Roman Empire itself.

I now digress to a brief explanation of bats. "Bat Out Of Hell" is the name of the singer Meatloaf's hugely popular album, a 1970s release with a few tracks still receiving substantial radio play. Mike Batt composed "The Wombling Song" and the Wombles themselves were a group of largish, environmentally aware, wombat-crossed-with-a-rat type animals who lived on Wimbledon Common and who were first seen in a series of books by Elizabeth Beresford and later in a television series. A wombat, by the way, is a sluggish, slothful, strange looking animal native to Australia which has to be seen to be believed. Or disbelieved. "Dracula" was first a Bram Stoker novel and much later a whole slew of movies with many permutations in the titles but pretty much set in Transylvania and focusing on a charming gent who liked blood, especially when sucked out of the necks of lovely young women. "Batman" began as a comic book, then a decidedly tongue in cheek 1960s television series, and finally a film franchise.

Two of the three incorrect answer choices are variations on book titles: "Gorillas In The Mist" by Dian Fossey and "The Moon's A Balloon", the first of two memoirs by actor David Niven. The third incorrect answer choice is a political term. Former Australian Prime Minister, Paul Keating, summed it up neatly when he said in an interview, "If this Government cannot get the adjustment, get manufacturing going again, and keep moderate wage outcomes and a sensible economic policy, then Australia is basically done for. We will end up being a third rate economy.... a banana republic." He was speaking on Radio 2GB in May, 1986. The term seems to have originally been used to describe struggling economies in Latin-American countries relying solely on agricultural exports e.g. bananas.

Answer: Marketing Goblins

Sample verse, taken from the back cover:
"Oh let's take him sister, we'll make him a star, and grow enormously fat on the profits!"
"But sister, he's ugly and small and his bottom is glued to a tuffet!"
"No matter, no matter, we'll pry it apart and send him to a beautician."
"But what if Little Miss Muffet finds out that her precious tuffet is mishin'?
"I think you meant 'missing' and she won't find out, she's in a different story."
"Oh yes, the one with the spider, I completely forgot, I've not covered myself in glory."
"Yes sister, I've certainly noticed of late that your mind has become a bit soft."
"Well you try sleeping on a bed of nails in an impossibly hot old loft!"
"Oh let us not quibble, dear sister of mine, the goblin is getting away."
"You catch it, I'm buggered, I'm sleeping here all day!"

All silliness aside, I can think of no more breathlessly brilliant poem than Christina Rossetti's 19th Century masterpiece, "Goblin Market". It has lent itself to so much unnecessary and often foolish interpretation by critics seeking a meaning beyond the tale itself, interpretations of an often disturbing nature, that it says a lot about their prurient minds. All great works of literature are fair game for picking apart and reconstructing, but it can be very annoying when applied to what started out as, and still is, just another scary but ultimately moralistic children's tale. Two sisters, Laura and Lizzie, are tempted by a bunch of goblins in a forest to taste their fruit. Laura wants to, Lizzie doesn't. Eventually Laura succumbs and eats the fruit, a lock of her hair as payment. She gets sick back home, Lizzie thinks more fruit might help her recover, so Lizzie returns to the forest. The goblins get a bit angry when Lizzie refuses to taste the fruit herself and violently attempt to forcefeed her. Lizzie refuses to open her mouth and the best the goblins can do is cover her with fruit juice (see how all this crazy symbolistic interpretation starts?!) and then they give up. Lizzie goes home, Laura licks off all the fruit juice (gee, I wonder what this is meant to imply?), Laura gets better and a happy ending is on the cards. All told in amazingly enjoyable verse. Along with Alfred Noye's "The Highwayman", it's one of the poems I would recommend to people who don't usually read poems. Just promise me you won't go looking for unintended meanings. Poets referred to in the question section were Robert Browning, William Wordsworth, John Donne and Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte. Honorable failure award goes to their brother Branwell. "Grumpy and the Two Snow Whites" really is fiction in the sense that I made the title up along with "The Pixie, the Trixie and the Lexie." "Jill and Jedda's Excellent Adventure" is a deliberate mangling of the movie title "Bill And Ted's Excellent Adventure".

Answer: Gullibility Travels

There was an assortment of paperbacks on a large table near the entrance. I asked the owner, who was now dipping a tiny cup into a soggy biscuit and attempting to feed it to a Barbie doll, if the paperbacks were going cheap.
"No, only the canary in the rabbit hutch outside goes cheep. And hurry up, I'm closing soon."
It was all too predictable as I finally looked through some of the paperbacks. A front cover with an inappropriate drawing, a back cover with an insane blurb, a deranged title, an unheard of author and every page completely blank except for the "I Hate Books" stamp. With time running out, I abandoned the paperbacks and went to the music section.

I'll try to explain the plot of "Gulliver's Travels" by Jonathan Swift as succinctly as possible, mainly because if I dwell on it too long it may freak you out. Ship's Captain Lemuel Gulliver likes to travel, evidently not such a pleasurable experience back in Swift's day (circa early 18th Century), especially for Gulliver who, after a shipwreck, ends up in Lilliput, where people are really, really tiny. Stuff happens. Later he ends up in a place called Brobdingnag, and is treated as a circus freak by a 70 foot tall farmer (that's a lot of metres). More stuff happens. Then he winds up in other weird lands, including the deliciously named Glubbdubdrib, with a quick stopover in Japan of all places. I am not making this up! The last part of the book is truly weird! Gulliver meets and comes to loathe a race of human savages called Yahoos, but gets on well with their rulers, a race of talking horses (yes, horses!) called, are you ready for this?, Houyhnhnms. (Organisers of Spelling Bees, take note.) Of course, stuff happens. Swift is actually poking fun at all forms of the society he lived in and hated, but in an obviously bizarre way. I wish I could have met him. "Lilliput One Over Me" should now need no explaining, "All The Press's Men" is really "All The President's Men", a book and movie and "The Y-Front Page" is really "The Front Page", a play and movie. Y-Fronts themselves are a type of underwear for males, also called briefs or jockeys. Depends on which part of the world you live in, I suppose. And I hope you noticed my allusion to the Harry Chapin song "Cat's In The Cradle" and the "Puss In Boots" story in the question section.

Answer: "Twelve Minutes Past Six In The Early Evening: Why I Really Wrote The 1812 Overture" by Peter Tchaikovsky

"A very interesting selection of music books you don't have here", I declared in my most insouciantly sarcastic voice. The owner's reply was instant. He removed the now fully grown daffodil from his head and threw it at mine. It was a poor throw, however, very limp and feeble. It landed two inches in front of him, curled up in a ball and fell asleep. No, I tell a lie. It was the cat he threw. The daffodil had long since run away.

Joseph Haydn (1732-1809), Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741), Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) and Friedrich Chopin (1810-1849): if they were still living they'd be rolling in royalties though perhaps far too old and decrepit to enjoy them. "Are You Being Served" was a very popular seventies sitcom set in a department store, with a liberal sprinkling of risque catchphrases constantly uttered by a few of the characters. As to the correct and incorrect answers to my question, I'll explain how I came up with the titles. 1812 is twelve minutes past six in the evening if using the 24 hour clock. Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) wrote the "1812 Overture" not for that reason, of course, but to commemorate the Russian defeat of Napoleon's French military forces in the year 1812. Bach (1685-1750) had 20 kids. Beethoven (1770-1827) was not a happy chappy for the most part and prone to temper tantrums. The imaginary book title about Handel (1685-1759) is self explanatory.

Answer: The Third Man From The Sun

"So where's this other bookshop of yours? I'll do my best to avoid it," I said, turning to face the owner. But a man with a hat and cane had mysteriously taken his place behind the counter.
"Hi," he said with an impish grin. "I'm Wally Winka. Come and see my Chick Lit factory." I turned and ran out the shop, screaming all the way home.

"The Third Man" by Graham Greene was made into a terrific movie, adapted by Greene himself, starring Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten and Trevor Howard. Set in Vienna just after World War Two, it focuses on Holly Martins (Cotten) and his attempts to investigate the allegedly corrupt shenanigans of his dead friend Harry Lime (Welles). All is not what it seems, to say the least. For those of you who have seen the movie but not read the book, Orson Welles's legendary "Cuckoo Clock" speech was not in the novel. Welles wrote it himself. With Greene's admiring approval, I hope. The fake title I gave alludes to the American sitcom "3rd Rock From the Sun". The other Graham Greene titles I mangled to death are "Travels With My Aunt", "Our Man in Havana", and "The Ministry of Fear". Tuna is an anagram of Aunt and Varlets is an anagram of Travels. A Varlet is a young male chaperone and can also be a rogue. We'll stick with the former meaning. Also mentioned was John Le Carre, born Cornwell, a popular writer of spy/espionage novels. Schadenfreude is not a German city but a word now part of the English language which means 'taking great pleasure in the misfortunes of others.' Wally Winka and his Chick Lit factory is not necessary to explain unless you've been hiding on another planet for a long, long time but surely they have the book ("Charlie and The Chocolate Factory" by Roald Dahl) and the original and best movie version of the genuine article on that planet too! ("Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory" with Gene Wilder as Wonka, be careful how you say that name).