The smartest and funniest quotations of all time, artfully arranged into witty—and surprising—categories. Every page will entertain, educate, and delight.Uncle John's dedicated team of quotationeers have scoured the worlds of entertainment, history, literature, politics, sports, and more to bring you this unique collection of utterances that bear repeating. From silly to profound, from Aristotle to Mr. T, you'll discover insights on such topics as love, sex, conspi...

Open this book anywhere, any time, any place for bite-size morsels of essential (and not-so-essential) knowledge.We have two mottos here at Portable Press: "Get smart" and "Have fun." As the publishers of the wildly popular Uncle John's Bathroom Reader series, we have twenty years' experience in translating our mottos into bestselling books, but we also know that not every reader is a bathroom reader.That's why we've created this definitive collect...

It was a feature peculiar to the colonial wars of North America, that the toils and dangers of the wilderness were to be encountered before the adverse hosts could meet. A wide and apparently an impervious boundary of forests severed the possessions of the hostile provinces of France and England. The hardy colonist, and the trained European who fought at his side, frequently expended months in struggling against the rapids of the streams, or in effecting the rugged passes of the mountains,...

Originally published in 1823, "The Pioneers" (in full "The Pioneers; or, The Sources of the Susquehanna") is the first of five novels, but the fourth chronological story, in the series The Leatherstocking Tales by American writer James Fenimore Cooper."The Pioneers" began the saga of frontiersman Natty Bumppo, also called Leather-Stocking, and tells the interlocking story of three characters in the fictional frontier town of Templeton, New York (based on the real ...

Written at speed after "The Last of the Mohicans" established Cooper’s reputation, and published just a year later in 1827, "The Prairie", the third published novel of the Leatherstocking Tales but the last in Deerslayer’s chronology, depicts Leatherstocking, now known as the trapper or the old man, in his final days.The setting is the edge of the Great Plains, the time is 1805, and the hero is in his eighties—his maturation and movement have paralleled that of the United S...

A loving look at toys and games—and the people who make and play them—from the past and present.Albert Einstein once said, “Play is the highest form of research.” Uncle John adds: “And it’s really fun!” And so is this e-book, which includes several classic articles from the Bathroom Reader archives along with a few all-new entries (including an inside look at the Angry Birds phenomenon). So whether you prefer a pair of dice, a deck of cards, a yo-yo, a game control...

A classic satire of Victorian society, Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest” is one of the author’s most frequently performed works. The story trivializes its characters, who through a series of deceptions pretend to be people that they are not in order to escape the burdensome demands of social conventions. When John Worthing visits his best friend Algernon Moncrieff, to whom he is known as Ernest, Algernon notices the curious inscription on his cigarette case which reads, “From...

Bite-sized bits of information to give you the edge on trivia night—from crime and punishment to the rich and famous to ghosts, ghouls, oddballs, and more!Packed with more than 400 pages, Uncle John's Bathroom Reader: Attack of the Factoids is a fact-a-palooza of obscure information. Like what, you ask? Here are just a few extraordinary examples:* Bats always turn left when they exit a cave.* In the 1960s, astronauts trained for moon voyages by walking on ...

With this volume filled with thousands of bizarrely fascinating facts, we're on a roll!Is there any other single book in the universe with this many awesome tidbits of bite-sized information? Nope. And that's a fact! At nearly 400 pages (with a handy index for your fact-seeking convenience), Wise Up! is a must-have for anyone who likes their information on the go. It's organized into hundreds of topics—everything from sports and entertainment to word origi...

THE METAMORPHOSIS (German: Die Verwandlung, also sometimes translated as The Transformation) is a novella by Franz Kafka, first published in 1915. It has been called one of the seminal works of fiction of the 20th century and is studied in colleges and universities across the Western world. The story begins with a traveling salesman, Gregor Samsa, waking to find himself trans¬formed (metamorphosed) into a large, monstrous insect-like creature. The cause of Gregor's transformation is never ...

Fact: Chocolate contains the alkaloid theobromine, which in high doses can be toxic to humans, and in even small amounts can kill dogs, parrots, horses, and cats.This means that despite its name, the Kit-Kat candy bar is not a recommended snack for your kitty-cat. I wonder how many cats have died because of this confusion.Fact: The most germ-laden place on your toilet isn't the seat or even the bowl--it's the handle.The s...

The Prince and the Pauper: Unabridged with all the Illustrations by Mark Twain.This is the story of two young boys, one a prince and the other a pauper, who look identical. They meet and on a whim trade places. Unfortunately each ends up trapped in the other's world. The result is a great adventure story told by the master storyteller Mark Twain. The text is unabridged and includes 114 vintage illustrations.Set in sixteenth-century England, Mark Twain's classic "tale for yo...