The Uncyclopedia

Front Cover
Hachette Books, Sep 15, 2004 - Games & Activities - 176 pages
Make way for this defiantly idiosyncratic, hilariously illuminating compendium of curiosities you never knew you wanted to know!

How do you flirt in Turkish? How do you dump someone in Japanese? What are the names of all the animals ever sent into space? These are just some of the fun and insightful oddities that made Gideon Haigh's The Uncyclopedia a hit overseas. The first ever encyclopedia for the curious, The Uncyclopedia is a compendium of illuminating knowledge and a delight for all inquisitive readers. As proved by Schott's Original Miscellany and the enormous rise in popularity of quiz and trivia nights, arcane knowledge and non-essential facts have never been so popular. At last in one convenient volume, everything for knowledge-hungry readers:

  • Lists of Norse gods
  • Suicide notes of the famous
  • All anyone needs to know about
  • How to toast in 10 languages
  • A list of all the men to walk on the moon
  • Twenty Latin mottoes
  • Fortune-telling techniques


  • Neither trivial nor essential, yet always engaging and illuminating, The Uncyclopedia is the reference book referred to purely for the purposes of amusement -- and readers just can't put it down!

    About the author (2004)

    Gideon Haigh is an Australian journalist and writer, born in 1965. He was educated at Trinity College at the University of Melbourne. He has contributed to numerous newspapers and magazines in his thirty years as a journalist. He has written thirty books and edited seven others. His book, On Warne, won the British Sports Book Awards Best Cricket Book of the Year Award, the Cricket Society and MCC Book of the Year Award, the Jack Pollard Trophy, and the Waverley Library Nib Award. The Office won the NSW Premier's Literary Awards Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-fiction. Other recent titles include Uncertain Corridors: Writings on Modern Cricket, End of the Road?, and The Deserted Newsroom. He was the winner of the 2016 Ned Kelly Awards best true crime award for Certain Admissions.

    Bibliographic information