Scouts in Bondage: And Other Violations of Literary Propriety, edited by Michael Bell (“bookseller of Lewes, East Sussex”), a 2006 edition of an earlier limited edition entitled Telling Tales: a little book of entertaining book covers, most of them featuring titles with unintended double entendres.
The cover that gave its name to Bell’s book, and two of the other titles in it:
There are some titles that are funny because of their content —
How to Recognise Leprosy: A Popular Guide; Book of Blank Maps: With Instructions; The Humour of Germany
— but most, like the three above, turn on lexical ambiguities. For instance,
Willie’s Ordeal; 50 Faggots; Christie’s Old Organ; Muffs and Morals; The Day Amanda Came; Memorable Balls; Fairies I Have Met; 101 Things for Girls to Do; Let’s Toss for It; The World’s Famous Queens; Single-Handed Cruising / The Danger of Cruising: and other Poems; Simple Hints for Mothers on the Home Sex-Training of Boys; A Toast Fag; The Captain’s Bunk; Pamela Pounce: A Tale of Tempestuous Petticoats; French for the Troops
This Amazon review by F. Orion Pozo does a good job of describing the book:
Scouts in Bondage is a photographic collection of book covers of titles that have not withstood the test of time. Compiled by a retired British secondhand book seller, this is an amusement for the bibliophile with a taste for the double entendre. It is a very short book with minimal text, highlighting about 45 photos of book covers whose intent was serious at the time but, over time, have developed unintended secondary meanings. Facing these covers is [sic] the bibliographic details (Author, title, publisher, date, and size) and occasional excerpts or additional information to add to the amusement.
The book is as meticulous as Bell could manage on bibliographic details, but it’s utterly hopeless on the background for the titles. Some are clear: Christie’s old organ is a musical instrument; the fairies are legendary creatures; French for the Troops is a language-teaching book. You can guess about others: Dick is presumably an invisible man (or boy). But some are opaque: those scouts in bondage, Nell scoring (at something, somehow), and the nature of single-handed cruising, for example. I longed to hear more about the stories.
November 5, 2012 at 8:56 am |
I once encountered an English-language instruction book called Cowboys in Alaska, for which I immediately began mentally composing additional adventures, which certainly would have taught the students some surprising vocabulary. And positions.
November 5, 2012 at 9:20 am |
The “bondage” the scouts were in (I have a copy of the book, now somewhat distressed, from my childhood) was a task they were “honour-bound” to complete. As you can imagine, they had lots of adventures and a good time was had by all.
November 5, 2012 at 3:37 pm |
In case anyone is still confused, the Oxford American Dictionaries’ definition #1 for “bondage” is :
the state of being a slave [the deliverance of the Israelites from Egypt’s bondage]
• figurative: a state of being greatly constrained by circumstances or obligations.
November 5, 2012 at 3:47 pm |
A similar book is How to Avoid Huge Ships: And Other Implausibly Titled Books (http://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Avoid-Huge-Ships-Implausibly/dp/1845133218), but with less sexually charged and more generally bizarre books (my copy is some distance away so I can’t quote any off the tope of my head).
Unfortunately, it too lacks in-depth information about the background of the books.