Photos of dinosaurs

(Originally published 18th July 2007)

Well, it's finally happened: the 'Photos of Dinosaurs' email is bouncing round cyberspace and should be lurking in all sorts of people's inboxes tomorrow morning.

Should there be anyone reading this who doesn't know me, Photos of Dinosaurs is my bid to become the Christmas bestseller of 2008. A bookshop is just about the only place where a customer can, and frequently does, come in and legitimately ask you about any topic whatsoever, aardvarks to zymurgy. And amongst all the sensible questions are a fair number of bizarre ones, which can come about from confusion, ignorance, wilful stupidity or too much exposure to reality television, and I've been hoarding such treasures for a while now.

The title of this putative bestseller - Photos of Dinosaurs - comes from one of my favourite enquiries: "you've only got books with pictures of dinosaurs; haven't you got any with photographs?". (I have an erstwhile colleague who's had the exact same too! And indeed just a couple of weeks ago someone I currently work with had the same question only about dragons!)

I reckon it might just take off. Buyers for bookshops would all identify with it and literary editors would have endless fun quoting from it. Douglas Adams and John Lloyd certainly recognised the latter possibility in The Meaning of Liff - their inspired little anthology of place names employed more usefully as words which should exist - which included:

Ripon (vb.)
(Of literary critics.) To include all the best jokes from the book in the review to make it look as if the critic thought of them.

I've registered the domain name photosofdinosaurs.com, as well as the obvious variations, and I've sent out an email to every bookish contact I have, encouraging them to send their own favourites to jonathan@photosofdinosaurs.com.

I've already had a few contributions from my shop, my favourite of which went as follows:

"Do you have books on London seasides?"
"Do you mean English seasides?"
"No, London coasts."
"London riversides?"
"No, London seasides."
"But London isn't on the coast."
"Don't worry about it mate, I'll go somewhere else where they know what they're talking about."

So, calling all booksellers....