Advertisement Author Edward Brooke-Hitching 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.