d100

Strange Books

Titles and tomes to fill any shelf, library or wizard tower.

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Strange Books — 100 entries
d100	Result
1	'A Taxonomy of Doors', with a chapter torn out and replaced by a pressed fern.
2	'The Care and Feeding of Shadows', third edition; the first two are listed as 'devoured'.
3	A cookbook whose recipes each list one impossible ingredient, crossed out, with substitutions in a shaky hand.
4	'Songs to Sing While Falling', unusually well-thumbed.
5	A dictionary of a language spoken only by two twins, compiled by their mother.
6	'On the Rudeness of Mirrors', a furious 400-page treatise.
7	A children's primer where the ABCs are all names of extinct beasts.
8	'Knots', volume IV. No text - every page holds a tied cord specimen. One is untied. The index calls it 'escaped'.
9	The autobiography of a lighthouse, as told to a monk.
10	'Practical Necromancy for the Squeamish', all practical parts removed by the censor and replaced with soup recipes.
11	A ledger of debts owed to the sea, in several hands, several centuries, still gaining entries.
12	'Field Guide to Birds That Do Not Exist', with checkmarks next to three of them.
13	A romance novel in whose margins a second, better romance unfolds between two of the margin-writers.
14	'The Collected Threats of Auntie Maude', bound in what the spine insists is 'best behavior'.
15	A book of maps of famous libraries, shelved incorrectly in every library it maps.
16	'How to Disappear Completely' - the catalogue lists it; the shelf shows a gap; the gap is warm.
17	'Meditations on the Second Moon', written in a hand that gets calmer as the content gets worse.
18	A play whose stage directions describe the audience.
19	'The Encyclopedia of Small Gods', volume 'Doorknob to Dust'.
20	A diary in two inks; the black entries are mundane, the brown entries answer them, a day late.
21	'On Being Eaten: Perspectives', an anthology; the contributor biographies are brief.
22	A hymnal where every hymn has been transposed into a minor key by a later hand, 'as corrections'.
23	'The Law of the Land', bound in turf, still growing; precedents must be watered.
24	A book of pressed flowers, each labeled with a name, a date, and 'forgiven' or 'not yet'.
25	'Advanced Falconry', dictated by the falcon.
26	A slim volume of poems that rhyme only when read angry.
27	'The Complete Atlas of the Bottom of the Lake', waterlogged, illustrated, accurate.
28	A prayer book with the responses filled in, in gold ink, in no known hand.
29	'Winters I Have Known', by an author whose name is snowed over on every edition.
30	A grammar of Ghoul, with pronunciation notes like 'through the nose, regretfully'.
31	'The Hedge-Witch's Herbal', with marginalia by three generations and one very opinionated goat.
32	A bestiary in which every beast's entry ends 'see also: us'.
33	'One Hundred Uses for a Dead Wizard', banned in eight cities, bestseller in nine.
34	The minutes of a village council meeting that has, according to the dates, been ongoing for 111 years. Item one remains tabled.
35	'Star Charts for Pessimists': every constellation drawn twice, once as it is, once as it will end.
36	A child's storybook where the wolf wins, published 'at the wolf's insistence'.
37	'The Art of War', translated into Halfling as 'The Art of Not Being Home When Trouble Calls'.
38	A book-length confession to a crime historians insist never happened; the details keep checking out.
39	'Cloudspotting for Druids', with a warning not to point.
40	An account book for a shop that sells 'hours'; the prices rise in the back pages.
41	'Letters to My Executioner', collected correspondence spanning forty years; they became friends; it is somehow worse.
42	A treatise on color written for the blind, praised by all who cannot read it.
43	'The Underground Gazetteer', listing taverns by depth.
44	A songbook where the notes are stitched, not written; play it by running a finger along the thread.
45	'Apologies to Trees', by the Guild of Woodcutters, volume XII.
46	A wizard's grimoire, entirely blank except the last page: 'You already know it. Stop looking things up.'
47	'The Almanac of Yesterday': utterly accurate, one day too late, every day.
48	A book on lock-picking with a lock on it. Inside, per rumor: a second lock.
49	'Marginalia', a book consisting only of collected margin notes from other books, which somehow tells a complete tragedy.
50	The recipe archive of a poisoners' guild, sorted by occasion. 'Weddings' is the thickest chapter.
51	'A History of the Next War', print run seized; this copy annotated by a general, in the field, weeping or laughing, hard to say.
52	A book of lullabies for monsters, field-tested, with survivors' notes.
53	'The Compleat Angler of the Astral Sea', with fly patterns for thoughts.
54	A travel guide to a city that appears once a generation; the newest edition is presold out for sixty years.
55	'Silence: A Reader'. The pages absorb nearby sound while open. Libraries fight over it.
56	A cookbook by a dragon: portions serve one.
57	'On the Domestication of Husbands', shelved under Animal Husbandry by a librarian with a grudge.
58	The collected excuses of the city watch, indexed, cross-referenced, and - in the margin - graded.
59	A geology text that refers to mountains by first name and asks after their health.
60	A saint's biography where every miracle has a footnote from a rival saint saying 'I helped'.
61	'The Book of Held Breaths', which cannot be read aloud, structurally.
62	An atlas where the sea has been labeled, in a child's hand, 'my side'.
63	'Feasts of the Fey Courts': reading the desserts chapter causes mild, harmless weeping.
64	The stud book of a legendary stable; the last page holds a single horseshoe nail, bound in like a relic.
65	'Common Curses and Their Streets', a gazetteer of where each hex was first uttered.
66	A manual for a siege engine that, per the diagrams, is also a church organ. Both functions are load-bearing.
67	'The Shepherd's Calendar of Wolves', kept jointly, per the foreword, by both parties.
68	A dream journal that has started completing entries the dreamer was too tired to finish.
69	'Heraldry of the Fallen Houses', where certain coats of arms are scratched out from the inside of the page.
70	Court transcripts of a trial where the accused, the judge and the witness were, it emerges on the last page, the same man.
71	'A Modest Proposal for the Draining of the Marsh', with a rebuttal, in mud, on every other page.
72	A phrasebook for talking to storms. Chapter one: apologies.
73	'The Little Book of Big Regrets', pocket-sized, heavier than it looks, literally.
74	An index of every bell in the kingdom by voice; three entries are marked 'lying'.
75	'Games for Immortals', turn-based; the current game began four dynasties ago; it is, a bookmark notes, your move.
76	The staff manual of an inn that stands at the crossroads of somewhere and elsewhere; the lost-property chapter is upsetting.
77	'Fungi: Friend, Foe, or Philosopher', with spore samples, one of which has read the book.
78	A volume of last words, alphabetized by speaker; the blank entries have dates next year.
79	'How to Read This Book', 500 pages, contradictory, beloved.
80	The muster roll of a legion that marched into the mountain and, per a new line each solstice, is still marching.
81	'Botany of the Battlefield': what grows where, and why, and for whom.
82	A courtesy guide for speaking with the dead: mostly about not mentioning the weather.
83	'The Nine Lies of Cartography', banned by the Mapmakers' Guild, written by its founder.
84	A wine list from a cellar that burned; sommeliers read it like elegy.
85	'Practical Invisibility', its author unknown, its royalties collected.
86	The logbook of a traveling tooth-puller, with a molar set into the cover like a gem.
87	'Constellations of the Underdark', star charts for a sky of glowworms, surprisingly rigorous.
88	A book sworn to be blank that refuses to be the book on top of any stack.
89	'The Diplomatic History of the Gnomes', abridged, 4,000 pages.
90	An etiquette guide for dragons' guests, whose chapters get shorter as the visit gets longer.
91	'Rain: An Appreciation', which is always slightly damp.
92	The sealed evidence of a famous trial, shelved by court order in a library that denies having it, in a wing that is not on the floor plan.
93	'Flightless': the collected letters of a griffin who lost her sky and learned, the last letter says, to love the orchard.
94	A primer on time, for children, that can only be read once.
95	'The Anatomy of Giants', life-size; the library built an annex.
96	A joke book from the dwarven deeps; the punchlines are structural.
97	'What the River Carries', a census of everything one river bore to the sea in one year, including, on page 300, a name the reader will recognize.
98	The unauthorized biography of a lich, updated by unseen hands whenever he does something embarrassing. He is trying to find every copy.
99	'Doors I Have Closed', a monk's memoir; the final chapter is just a key, bound into the spine.
100	A book with your name as the author. You have not written it. Yet. The dedication thanks the party.