LAST ITEM HELD MATCHING THIS TITLE STATED:

Dennis Dobson, London, 1965. hardcover, 5½" x 8", with dust jacket. Ours is an ex-library copy in transparent protective covering, with usual stamps, stickers and barcode. Front hinge partly exposed. GOOD book in GOOD price-clipped dust jacket. Beginning with the pressure-cooker (invented in 1680) and ending with a plea for a device to protect a typist's fingers from the ink when changing ribbons [remember them?], this book is packed with lively stories of strange inventions - and stranger inventors. Egon Larsen, a famous collector of the men who make our life easier (and of course more complicated), presents a lively, brilliant pageant of masterminds in the lab, of the lucky ones and of others who sweated it out, of lone wolves and opportunists, of cranks and charlatans.