The "beach book" is one of those marketing myths that help the publishing industry make what little money it does. It goes like this: during those long, lazy summer months, people love to do nothing more than lie back on a lounge chair, sip a daiquiri, and crack open the latest modern literature about dysfunctional, neurotic women finding eternal happiness by catching themselves Mr. Right. Of course, the actual reality is that most of us are imprisoned in office towers during the hot, crappy summer months, and we're more likely to spend our free time doing something a little more active. Books are for the winter, when it's too cold to go outside, and when you can actually concentrate on a book during your morning commute because you haven't been trapped in a 95-degree subway car between Mr. Fecal Odor and Ms. Curried Armpit for the past six hours.

Still, in keeping with tradition, we've decided to present our own take on the summer reading list. Screw the Times book review: we're going to take you down the primrose path where any hope of quality, or even sense, is left by the wayside. Sometimes, my water-brothers, a book is so bad that you have to either laugh at it, or else base a religion around it. Quite by accident, I happened across one magazine devoted to bad literature, Book Happy, while doing research for this article. Believe it or not, there are actually people devoted to collecting and reading these Plan Nines From Outer Spaces of the publishing world.

Yet, there would seem to be one untapped mother lode of poor writing, a great artery of bad taste leading directly into the darkness that is at the heart of America. Like an archaeologist sifting through layer after layer of prehistoric crap on the floor of some cave to find out what people ate in the Paleolithic, dutiful attention paid to this debris will no doubt give great insight into the psyche of our great land. I speak, of course, of the great world of vanity publishing.

Before we embark on our journey of discovery, a brief explanation of what a vanity press actually is would be in order. Before the World Wide Web enabled any idiot to broadcast their thoughts through the ether, the last hope of the great aspiring unwashed was what is euphemistically termed a "subsidy publisher." The principle is pay-to-play: Instead of the publishing house assuming the financial risk of producing a book, the burden is shifted onto the author, who forks over approximately the price of a car to see their words edited, printed, and bound into a completed product. Marketing, publicity, and distribution are, for the most part, in the hands of the author, though some vanity houses contribute a little to this process.

Vanity publishing is more widespread than you might think. One hundred and fifty years ago, it was pretty much par for the course for a well-off gentleman to pay for his own book's production. Several more recent well-known writers, such as Margaret Mitchell and Pat Conroy, have actually used subsidy publishers to get their careers off the ground. The downside is, of course, that, unlike publishers who survive by selling quality books to the public, there is a little to no editorial review process to weed out the books that have little audience, are poorly written, or the works of raving lunatics. Perhaps the subsidy press syndrome is why Conroy has been able to publish the same damn book about his dysfunctional Southern family about eighty times under various titles.

My first job in publishing, I'm sorry to say, was working for the nation's oldest and most established subsidy press. "Working" is perhaps not the right word. "Allowing myself to be tortured for a minimal salary" would be a better description. Our workspace, which hadn't been refurbished since approximately 1948, was an intellectual Dickensian sweatshop. Chained to a desk eight hours a day, with every motion, including lunch breaks, precisely monitored by a malodorous supervisor, I was buried under an avalanche of the worst manuscripts every conceived by the subhuman mind. It felt like a literary Mystery Science Theater 3000. The office was the beach where every rejected, half-assed, semi-literate manuscript in this great country of ours finally washed up to rot in the sun. I could actually feel the insanity leaping off the pages and into my brain.

Most of the books-and I use the term loosely-that crossed my desk dealt with one of several major themes. The most common genre was the memoir written by some old lady from Duluth spending her children's inheritance to publish her recollections of the Depression. Most of these, while not scintillating reading, tended to be fairly lucid, though there were also some that seemed to be catalogues of every wrong ever suffered over 80 years of so-called life. As a history buff, the ones I found most fascinating were memoirs of World War II or other historical events. Of course, though most veterans had the heroic task of typing up requisitions for blankets and jeep parts, and that people who have actually been in combat don't usually like to talk about it, every so often I'd happen across a first-hand account of the landing at Guadalcanal or battles against the Nazis in central Italy.

The second great category was attempts at novel-writing, ranging from the bad to the friggin' awful. The most common genres, to no one's surprise, were romance, mystery, and sci-fi. Most read like an attempt to write a screenplay for a very bad movie. Some were no worse than the usual Danielle Steele claptrap. The sci-fi were the worst, usually written by oversized fanboys whose understanding of the universe had been gleaned from Heinlein novels. These were often unintentionally hysterical.

Then, of course, there was the utter insanity, in which aliens, Jesus, or both invariably played a big role. There were spiritual tracts, sometimes written entirely in capital letters. There were author's biographies that described how to cover your kitchen in aluminum foil so that the CIA's mind-control satellites couldn't monitor your thoughts. For some reason I shall never understand, mental illness tends to involve either extraterrestrials or religion. Yet, for some reason I can never discern, the publishing house would never reject these poor souls' manuscripts so long as they could be re-typed into a word processor and typeset in Quark.

Next: And We Quote