Five Miles Under the Booker Radar

You are immediately surrounded by bestsellers when you walk into the average chain book store. The publishers have paid thousands of pounds to get within spitting distance of the shop door, and naturally they can only lavish this cash on what is going to sell. So it is easy to forget what a miniscule fraction of books in existence this represents until one day you find a book on your desk at work entitled "Nitrification Inhibition in the Treatment of Sewage".

This book has been a healthy lender at the local college libary since 1998; except for the whole of 2000 when it wasn't borrowed once. This is worrying...perhaps Britain's sewage was particularly uninhibited that year. I would hate to think that the nation's turds were dancing on tables and making arses of themselves in public. (That's betting without ITV's Club Reps, of course.)

Yikes! There are over a thousand listed books on amazon.co.uk when you search on the word "sewage". More intriguingly, the sidebar points me towards a video called Sewage Baby. Now let's see..."Flushed down the drain at birth, and denied the basic love that was rightfully his, this is the tale of the termination that went horribly wrong..." You can almost smell the Oscar nominations.

Ah, but why assume the worst? We need the counsel of someone who has watched this possible classic. So we turn to the reviews: "Boo! rubbish!" comments one reviewer. "I've had more fun popping spots."

I was supposed to be writing about that terrible book sitting on the desk beside me, but the lure of these dire horror films is strong...simply pick a particularly nasty little word from the dictionary and throw it between the rollers of Amazon's search box.

Let us run through a brief example. Predictably, "brain" has a fairly conservative return on the search box. Doctor Who, Pinky and the Brain, Trap Door...but half way down the list I find the frankly eyebrow raising "Topless Brain Surgeons", and perhaps better still, "UFO Encounter - Maybe You Don't Believe Because They Messed With Your Brain". I see they've retained a sense of healthy scepticism with the word "maybe" there. Presently it languishes at 23,661 in the sales ranking. Perhaps aliens have messed with the chart to suppress the truth. Yes, that's probably it. Hey, what's this scar at the back of my head? I never noticed that before...