The strangest books and manuscripts ever written

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Author spent nearly a decade searching for the weirdest books in the world – and his investigations have paid off in spellbinding style.He has bound together a cornucopia of curiosities in a fascinating tome called The Madman’s Library, published by Simon & Schuster, which reveals the strangest books and manuscripts ever written, and the stories behind their creation.He documents books bound in human skin, a commode disguised as book, a bible that conceals a pistol, cryptic passages that not even military codebreakers can crack, Martian writing channelled through a psychic, pacts with the Devil, a war diary written on a violin, books so minuscule they’re invisible to the human eye and a giant medieval book that weighs 74kg. Simon & Schuster says that ‘every strand of strangeness imaginable (and many inconceivable) has been unearthed and bound together for a unique and richly illustrated collection’.Brooke-Hitching, meanwhile, sums it up thus – ‘the forgotten recollected’.Scroll down for a peek at some of the oddball tomes he has uncovered, and pipe up if you think you’ve decrypted the mysterious Voynich Manuscript…  Behold The Codex Gigas (or Devil’s Bible), which Brooke-Hitching explains is the largest existing medieval manuscript. The 74kg tome is said to have been written in one night by a monk charged with diabolic power, he says. It resides in the National Library of Sweden in Stockholm This picture shows an extraordinary Italian ‘prayer book pistol’, which was custom-made for Francesco Morosini, the Duke of Venice (1619-94), reveals Brooke-Hitching. The gun, he explains, was likely used for personal protection and can only fire when the book is closed via a trigger-pin concealed in silk thread that’s designed to look like a bookmark RELATED ARTICLES Previous 1 Next Pottering poetically: Following in the footsteps of our… Easyjet launches cabin trolley home delivery service using… It’s brutal up North! New photography book offers a visual… For Londoners it’s fish and chips, in Sydney it’s rock… The £180million floating fortress superyacht for eco-warrior… Life with the world’s most isolated tribe: Beautiful…

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Can you work out what this page says? If you can, then you’ve outsmarted some of the world’s finest cryptographers, including British WWII codebreakers. The page is from the Voynich Manuscript, which is named after the Polish rare book dealer, Wilfrid Voynich, who found it in 1912 in an Italian village. It’s thought to date to the 15th century – but to this day, no cryptographer – amateur or professional – has been able to decipher it. It could be aliens, it could be seventh-century Cornish, it could be a hoax. So what do we know? Not much, says Brooke-Hitching, beyond the fact that the author was right-handed. It currently resides at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library A human skull covered in prayers for the deceased that resides in the Wellcome Collection in London. It was collected by Robert Baden-Powell during an expedition to Ghana in 1895 This book is bound in human skin. Its title is A Treaty on Virginity, Pregnancy and Childbirth and it was penned by Severin Pineau and printed in Amsterdam in 1663. Brooke-Hitching says that a note by the book’s owner, Dr Ludovic Bouland, reveals the nature of the macabre material used to bind it: ‘This curious little book… has been re-dressed in a piece of the skin of a woman tanned for myself.’ Brooke-Hitching explains that book-binding with human skin dates back to at least the 13th century and that in the 18th and 19th centuries ‘[human skin] became an acceptable decorative extra when publishing accounts of murderers’ crimes and medical studies’. He adds that ‘a human-skin book was also, frankly, a great thing to show off at parties’ LEFT: The 12-page Old King Cole book issued by Gleniffer Press in Scotland in 1985. It measures 1mm by 1mm and Brooke-Hitching says that its pages can only be turned using a needle. RIGHT: The 2016 smallest book in the world, by Russian physicist Vladimir Aniskin, which contains letters just 15 micrometres tall, sprayed using a lithographic stencil. The letters spell out the character names from the 1881 story by Nikolai Leskov called The Tale of Cross-eyed Lefty from Tula and the Steel Flea, which tells the tale of engravers who make inscribed shoes for clockwork fleas. ‘Aniskin cleverly trumped them all,’ says Brooke-Hitching A traditional 18th-century Nepalese shaman’s manual that’s covered in blood, skin and flesh fragments from five animals ‘representing the five senses’ – buffalo, chicken, dog, goat and cow. The tome contains spells for exorcising spirits  A spell manual used by wizards of the Indonesian Toba Batak tribe that’s in a collection belonging to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam This is a remarkable portable oak commod