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The Crackpot Compendium
A mind-boggling and fascinating A-Z of history's most eccentric thinkers
Brief Description
A truly mind-boggling and fascinating A-Z of history’s most eccentric thinkers. Filled to bursting with jaw-droppingly strange episodes from history, The Crackpot Compendium is a riotous tour of crackpot inventors, false prophets, quacks and pseudo-scientists, con-artists and impostors, and hundreds of other truly ‘outside-the-box’ thinkers. Discover...
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Format: Hardback
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A truly mind-boggling and fascinating A-Z of history’s most eccentric thinkers.
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Description
A truly mind-boggling and fascinating A-Z of history’s most eccentric thinkers.
Filled to bursting with jaw-droppingly strange episodes from history, The Crackpot Compendium is a riotous tour of crackpot inventors, false prophets, quacks and pseudo-scientists, con-artists and impostors, and hundreds of other truly ‘outside-the-box’ thinkers.
Discover stories of dinosaur espionage, earthquake-predicting plants and leech barometers, cat pianos and canine translation devices, immortal adventurers, cities spotted on the Moon and aliens living on the Sun. This colossal collection travels the world and across the millennia to take in telepathic Soviet circus clowns, Scottish abominable snowmen, Welsh prophets, ancient Chinese test pilots, invisible African mountains, and the aviator known as ‘Wrong Way’ Corrigan who accidentally flew backwards across the Atlantic.
If you have ever wondered how to build a pigeon death-ray, start a snake cult with a hand-puppet, interrogate a houseplant or perform psychic surgery, The Crackpot Compendium will provide the answers (while also probably leaving you with a few new questions.)
Book Details
INFORMATION
ISBN: 9781398532427
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Ltd
Format: Hardback
Date Published: 08 October 2026
Country: United Kingdom
Imprint: Simon & Schuster Ltd
Audience: General / adult
DIMENSIONS
Spine width: 26.0mm
Width: 135.0mm
Height: 216.0mm
Weight: 0g
Pages: 384
About the Author
Edward Brooke-Hitching is the author of the critically acclaimed and bestselling books The Phantom Atlas (2016), The Golden Atlas (2018), The Sky Atlas (2019), The Madman's Library (2020) and The Devil's Atlas (2021), all of which have been translated into numerous languages; he is also the author of Fox Tossing, Octopus Wrestling and Other Forgotten Sports (2015). He is a writer for the BBC series QI. A fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and an incurable cartophile, he lives surrounded by dusty heaps of old maps and books in Berkshire.
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