This book is definitely a tad hit-and-miss, as so many 'compilations' are. I expected the whole book to be made up of funny editorial slips and mistakes but that isn't the case - which is a shame as these are the sections which work best and make the book worth a read.

The section on humorous spelling mistakes, and the hilarious group of exam and essay quotes from misguided literature students, had me crying with laughter. The literary graffiti found across the world's walls and the list of utterly random book titles were also very amusing. Other sections - on famous last words and the working titles of well-known books, for example - had paragraphs of author details that altered each example's focus and sometimes led me to skip entirely over the 'funny' punchline by mistake. They would have been more suited to a book of trivia and made me feel a bit bored and misled by the book description.

With a few of the quotes I found it hard to work out what was supposed to be making me laugh. There did seem to be an assumption that the reader was intimately familiar with the texts, which became particularly painful in the section on Bible misprints. Haining has to include the missing words in each example in brackets, and it just falls very, very flat in all but a couple of examples.

All in all, a patchy book - the variety show of literature. It's worth a look for the side-splitting strong areas, but maybe borrow it from the library instead of buying so you can skip over the dull sections without wasting your money! ( )