Curious buit rarely useful advice

Ian Pindar, ed.  How to Cook A Hippopotamus (Folio Society, 2006) A collection of advice and instruction, ranging from how to cure a cold to how to practice ventriloquism. As for cooked hippo, you boil the chunk you want to eat, then “souse it in vinegar, with chopped onions and cayenne pepper.” In short, as with any wild meat, overwhelm its flavour with strong spices.
     Advice books are older than the Bible (which is a compilation and redaction of many earlier works). Following Gutenberg’s (re-)discovery of printing with movable type, one of the earliest international best-sellers was Castiglione’s The Courtier (1508-1529, yes, it took 20 years to write), which was translated into all the principal European languages, and influenced a slew of successors. That is, imitators shamelessly stole from it. That’s been the method of composing advice books ever since, and next to cookbooks, they form the most reliably profitable product of the great publishing houses of the Galaxy.

    This compilation will save the reader the tedium of searching for useful tidbits, and for that reason alone is worth seeking out. I received it as a gift, and have consulted it several times. I have, however, followed none of its advice. ***