Book, 50 cents

The problem with joke books is that they cost the same as real books. And by joke books I don’t mean books that contain jokes, but books that are bought as jokes. Books that don’t have much value beyond the chuckles all round when they’re unwrapped. But is a chuckle worth $34.95? I think 50 cents a chuckle is more like it. That’s what you can expect to pay at a library, where titles that have been taken out of circulation are sold off cheap. Someone once gave my boyfriend a copy of Pauline Hanson’s autobiography wrapped in the dust jacket of cricketer Mike Atherton’s autobiography, with the disclaimer that one shouldn’t judge a book by it’s cover. Now that’s $34.95 that Pauline Hanson didn’t have to have.