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Narnia creator C.S. Lewis claimed “You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me,” but he never read Phillip Parker’s “The 2007-2012 Outlook for Tufted Washable Scatter Rugs, Bathmats and Sets That Measure 6-Feet by 9-Feet or Smaller in India.”

It’s only 144 pages long, but, like Parker’s other 200,000 book titles, computer algorithms are used to compile publicly available information into books of limited interest that can be printed individually as orders are received.

Parker’s day job is to work as a professor of management for an international business school, but his sideline is his money-maker. Some of his titles sell hundreds of copies, but most sell far less. However, his only overhead consists of 70 computers, six programmers, and no authors or editors.

A recent New York Times article on Phillips says he “holds some provocative — and apparently profitable — ideas on what constitutes a book.”

A book, according to the American Heritage Dictionary, is “A set of written, printed, or blank pages fastened along one side and encased between protective covers.” Book lovers believe contents, rather than its physical construction, make the book, but opinions vary wildly over which books are best and worst.   Somewhere on the Internet, some cultural infidel has posted a hateful review of your favorite book. Just Google “worst book ever written” and you’ll find an amazingly deep current of pro-and-con thought on every book imaginable. Most agree that the “worst” books should include “Atlanta Nights,” a collaborative novel by some sci-fi and fantasy authors writing under the pseudonym Travis Tea (“travesty”).

Their intentionally horrible book was created in 2004 to expose the questionable sales tactics of PublishAmerica, a pay-to-publish outfit founded in 1999 that claims to be “a traditional publishing house” rejecting 80 percent of all manuscripts it receives for substandard writing, and giving authors advance payments.

A Publisher’s Weekly article by Stephen Zeitchik reported disgruntled PublishAmerica clients said the company, which “presents itself as a traditional publishing house but acts like a vanity publisher,” provided terrible, expensive service and pays meager $1.00 advances.

Unsurprisingly, PublishAmerica accepted “Atlanta Nights” for publication without editorial comment despite deep flaws like missing and identical chapters, characters randomly changing race and gender and wildly inaccurate spelling and grammar.   You could call Charles L. Webster and Company a vanity press, and maybe the best ever. Charles was Mark Twain’s nephew and frontman for the company Twain established to publish his own books more anonymously.

Their first book was “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” and the second, “The Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant,” was nearly as monumental.

Garrison Keillor mentioned Grant’s autobiography last week on “The Writer’s Almanac,” saying “Critics and writers of the time were shocked at how well Grant wrote. His book ‘Personal Memoirs’ is one of the few books ever written by an American president that qualifies as great literature.”

For clarity, openness and humility, none approach it, and the conditions under which Grant composed it are astounding.

Grant formed an ill-advised investment firm in 1881 with his son, Ulysses Jr., and young friend, Ferdinand Ward. Ward, a Ponzi schemer, left Grant penniless and shamed in 1884.

Diagnosed with advanced throat cancer soon thereafter, Grant’s personal friend, Mark Twain, arranged for Century Magazine to publish Grant’s accounts of several major battles. He then offered Grant 70 percent of the net profit for a book of memoirs. Twain advised Grant on style, punctuation and grammar, but the writing was all Grant’s.

The book was sold door-to-door by subscriptions, following Twain’s idea of hiring uniformed Civil War veterans as salesmen. The nation knew the general was in great pain and dying as he wrote, and followed the book’s development with unusual attention.

Though pain and discomfort precluded writing for days and weeks, Grant managed an incredible rate, up to 10,000 words a day, completing it in July 1885, five days before his death. This eventually provided his wife over $400,000 in royalties when the book proved the biggest seller then in American publishing history.

The library owns several copies of Grant’s memoirs, including the excellent Library of America edition. It’s an immensely readable American classic, and it is, as Dan Quayle once described another book, “A very good historical book about history.”