Great British Inventions (edited by Mark Tanner from the records of The United Kingdom Patents Office)

Mark Tanner is completing an MPhil in European Literature at Cambridge University. He was inspired to research into bizarre patents when he saw a photograph of an umbrella with a representation of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel on the underside. Forty years of Great British Inventions, chosen from the records of the UK Patents Office a baffling, bizarre and often bonkers display of inventive, if not always exactly useful imagination.Cast your eyes across forty years of British inventiveness and what would you expect to find? A vast collection of scatalogical obsession? Of course you would. And in this modest volume are some of the most immodest proposals, all of them genuine and legally registered with the patent office; a spanking selection of all that preoccupies the national psyche:adjust your position in the special chair for coitionif you have the trots, try inflatable chamber potsdeal with that excrement with our anal wiping implementin the park, up the garden path, all along the main drag you cannot afford to be without our patent whoopsie bagif it meets your approval, try the separating trouser-type garment for access without removal . and you thought the Japanese were strange.