About The Manbottle Library
Imagine a Victorian-era British major-general. He is a military man, an explorer, a scholar, a scientist, an artist, et cetera. He's the type of guy that straps on a pith helmet to go stomping around Africa hunting exotic animals or missing doctors. He fought in the Queens army to bring civilization to the heathens of India. He's traveled to Outer Mongolia searching for rare treasures. He regularly invents strange looking flying machines, which with amazing regularity fail to fly, and other whizzing, whirring, steam-powered, Rube Goldberg-esque contraptions. And while Gin is obligatory, he is particularly found of Scotch Whiskey. He possesses an incorrigible, and frequently risqué, sense of humor.
Now imagine his ancestral home back in the English countryside. In it is a rather largish study/library/laboratory. It is filled with all manner of rare and wondrous artifacts collected from a lifetime of travels throughout the most distant reaches of the globe. It contains the taxidermic trophy heads and skins of many an extinct species. It contains historical relics plundered from Egypt, Palestine, India, China, and other inhospitable, uncivilized lands. It contains the detritus of many scientific experiments, not all of which were entirely successful. It contains books, papers, and manuscripts to rival the library of Alexandria. Amongst the vast stores of information is a vast collection of humor, both printable and not, and a wealth of trivial information, from the mundane to the sublime. It is all somewhat dusty. It smells old.
It is, in short, his retreat, his sanctuary, where he spent the waning years of an astounding life, engaged in a variety of noble pursuits that did not require the unending travel or the extreme physical exertion that typified the earlier years of his life.
His name is Manbottle. Phineas T. Manbottle. And this is his library. It is now open to the public (except Tuesdays). This website is it's projection into the online world. It is The Manbottle Library of Arcane Knowledge and Questionable Humor.
The "Phineas T. Manbottle Library of Arcane Knowledge and Questionable Humor" began as the private collection of that famous English explorer, inventor, musician, and soldier Major ...
