Chicago is cooler than normal

Here at the Jefferson Library we are great consumers of pie, leftover food, and quirky publishers' catalogs.  (Also Alpenland catalogs.)  For the past month we've been amusing ourselves with the Shire Books catalog - you can buy entire books on things like perambulators and village pumps and Victorian undertakers from them! - but just a few days ago we received the newest brain candy, the University of Chicago Press catalog.

I find most university press catalogs tedious.  Chicago's is delightfully wacky yet simultaneously intellectual.  Flipping through one of their catalogs is like a parade of all the fascinating little corners of human inquiry and experience.  To give you an idea, in this season's catalog:

• Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend
• The Subversive Copy Editor
  
• Mr. Jefferson and the Giant Moose: Natural History in Early America
• In Hock: Pawning in America from Independence through the Great Depression
• A Tenth of a Second: A History
• Playing the Fool: Subversive Laughter in Troubled Times
• Making the Grade: The Economic Evolution of American School Districts
• Socrates and the Fat Rabbis
• Sinister Yogis
• Collections of Nothing
• Castles, Battles, and Bombs: How Economics Explains Military History
• On the Fireline: Living and Dying with Wildland Firefighters
• Running: A Global History
• (which is cancelled out by) Pie: A Global History
• Invented Knowledge: False History, Fake Science and Pseudo-Religions
• The Rules of Association Football, 1863

And of course I won't mention the naughty titles, because my mother is reading this blog.  Anyway, Chicago did not pay me to say this but, if you love books, their catalog is a garden of delights.  (You can actually download it in PDF form from their website here, if you're interested.)