ON BOOKSHELVES

ON BOOKSHELVES
"Wearing of This Garment Does Not Enable You to Fly" by Jeff Koon and Andy Powell (Free Press, $12.95).
Mike Maza of The Dallas Morning News writes: Great title: Too bad the authors couldn't find the actual item -- a Superman outfit? -- labeled with that mythic testimonial to our litigious culture (and the stupid ways companies try to limit responsibility). But similarly dumb labels are everywhere. On a window screen: "Caution!!! Children can't fly." On a toilet bowl cleaner: "Safe to use around pets and children, although it is not recommended that either be permitted to drink from the toilet."
This compilation is a sequel for the authors, a pair of Georgia tyros last heard from with their dumb-laws book, "You May Not Tie an Alligator to a Fire Hydrant." That was a spinoff of dumblaws.com, the Web site they started as high schoolers. Now they're in college.
"Schott's Original Miscellany" by Ben Schott (Bloomsbury, $14.95).
Michael Pakenham of The Baltimore Sun writes: An enormous best seller in Britain, this quirky, serious, ridiculous, narcotic volume is a repository of the sort of wide-ranging fact that is too often trivialized as trivia. I have no idea where else, short of a research library, you might find within easy reach a list of 43 phobias, (e.g., philematophobia -- fear of kissing), the identities of all multiple Nobel Prize winners, or a complete taxonomy of cattle branding. This edition is tilted for American use (e.g., 14 dimensions of the Statue of Liberty) but retains a vast quantity of peculiarly British usages (e.g. 68 terms of Cockney rhyming slang). An irresistible, irreplaceable, inexhaustible delight.
Combined dispatches