Time-Wasting with Mr Cooper
Good news; a sequel is out to Robin Cooper's the Timewaster Letters; one of the inconsequential publishing delights of the past year.
In the first book, Cooper (a pseudonym for Robert Popper, the co-creator of BBC2's sporadically great Look Around You) wrote a series of letters to a wide array of companies and societies, generally those on the slightly obscure side ( the Association of Small Historic Towns and Villages, the British Colour Makers Association, the Liberal Democrat Party etc.)
The original book simply records Cooper's letters to these institutions, and the replies he receives from them. His missives consist of unfailingly polite, yet mind-churningly bizarre suggestions and requests. It's impossible to explain how funny these are without you reading them in full, but suffice to say the long sequence of letters to Dorian Kindersley Books containing increasingly demented ideas for children's books, and the astoundingly kind and benign (though firmly negative) responses they receive is the most hilarious thing I've read all year. Just buy it, and the new one while you're at it.
One side-issue which comes from the book is how pleasant and polite the replies of small British organisations are to complete lunatics. This is, I think, to their credit. Indeed only the Association of Small Historic Towns and Villages themselves come across as downright rude. They are positively brutal in their arbitrary rejection of Cooper's suggestion of a floating, sentient, omniscient, moustachioed ping-pong bat as their new emblem.
You'd better watch it with this bunch. They're the bad boys of small-scale regional promotion and development.
I think the Publishing house you meant was Dorling Kindersley, rather than Dorian Kindersley. Unless this is a book publisher that never seems to age, and has a portrait in the attic? Perhaps I’m confused.