Also known as "The Official Handbook of the Not Terribly Good Club of Great Britain", this
book was written by
Stephen Pile, the founder of the Not Terribly Good Club itself, to celebrate the diverse and wonderful joys of
incompetence. The reasoning, of course, is that "success is overrated."
Mankind spends a disproportionate amount of time talking about the things he does well, when these few blades of grass are surrounded by vast prairies of inadequacy which are much more interesting.
The book is a
compendium of the most gifted
failures which have been committed, in fields ranging from 'The Most Inaccurate Value of
Pi'(the General Assembly of Indiana passed a Bill ruling that pi was four) through 'The Least Successful Pornographic Bookseller'(who was fined because his books were not sufficiently
pornographic) to 'The Least Successful
Alcoholics Anonymous Metting' (ended with a cloakroom
brawl after £385 had been spent at the bar).
The book includes a special tribute to the infamous 'Man from Porlock', of Kubla Khan fame, and an appendix on 'The Art of Being Wrong'.
Altogether, almost as good a source of obscure factoids as it is entertaining.