The Little Black Book of Red Tape - out in paperback.

04 October, 2008 Filed in: Little Black Book
The Little Black Book of Red Tape, hardback copies of which, I am told, are becoming difficult to obtain, is now out in paperback. If you don't know anything about the Little Black Book of Red Tape, here’s an excerpt from the pre-amble.

“This book is about people's experiences with the official world. When I say ‘official’, I am referring not only to the whole beige panoply of councils, departments and ministries of state; but also to petty bureaucrats, jobsworths and a motley selection of twittering imbeciles from many kinds of different organisations. From car parking contractors to online auction sittes, from public to private organisations, they all have their own counter-intuitive rules, regulations and 'red tape' to inflict in the rest of us.”

The Little Black Book of Red Tape is a kind of compendium of such stories, a sort of almanac of the bullshit of the modern world, and a catalogue of individual heroic battles against the corporate state. It features the Derby householder who sold off minute plots of his back garden to well wishers around the world for £1 each to prevent the council putting a bypass through it; the Shropshire bus service that doesn’t stop as ‘stopping disrupts the timetable’; and the hospital recently fined £2.5 million for using ‘spare capacity’ to treat patients quickly.

All of that for less than £6.99. You can order it here and here.