Eurekaaargh! by Adam Hart-Davis

Hey, remember Past Times? It was a chain of shops, based in the UK but having a mail-order and retail presence in the US as well, from the mid-80s until they collapsed in 2012.

Basically, if you wanted stuff like what you'd get for donating to PBS without actually donating to PBS -- or other vaguely British, antique-themed, or retro goods, primarily for gifts -- they were your go-to outlet. (And I may sound dismissive, but I got their catalog for twenty years, shopped in their stores multiple times, and bought plenty of tchotckes there.) [1]

They also had a fairly extensive publishing operation, since a lot of what they sold were books, and the mills of Big Publishing didn't grind twee quite fine enough for their needs. One of those books was the 1999 volume Eurekaargh! by Adam Hart-Davis, which combined a delve into the Patent Office records of at least two countries with some familiar-looking public-domain art to keep its board covers about 180 pages apart.

And I read that book not too long ago: it's yet another bathroom book that I'm catching up on, now that I'm pretending my ennui has dissipated. (Note: never claim to have gotten over anything, particularly vague psychological conditions. The world delights in hammering hubris.)

It is pleasant and factual in its way, with a dozen chapters offering, as the subtitle puts it, "a spectacular collection of inventions that nearly worked." In other words, it collects early versions of things that later became important -- cars, bicycles, airplanes, motorboats, flush toilets, small appliances, medical devices, and so on -- and explains quickly why those versions didn't work but led the way to later versions that did.

There are lots of illustrations, mostly taken from the patent applications themselves, making this an easy, quick read. The book is in a small format, making it convenient to carry if you did want to read it on the go -- though the content, being in lots of little snippets, makes it more suitable for reading in random moments in one place. (As I, in fact, did.)

I'm not exactly recommending it, and I'm not exactly not recommending it. It is what it is, it's amusing at that, and it fits the Past Times standard of "stuff about how the world 50-125 years ago was quirky, interesting, and/or better."


[1] I am less clear on what their USP was to people who already lived in Britain and were surrounded by vaguely British stuff already. I presume the retro piece was even stronger on that side of the pond.