And then the hammer came down

I have seen many odd things on the Internet over the decades…

…but THIS is so fucking peculiar I can barely get my head around it. Spotted it on Tumblr this afternoon and was… perplexed. Indeed, I thought it had to be some rather esoteric joke or something; the idea that a spoken word album of the fucking Malleus Maleficarum read by Francis Urquhart is something that a record label—even a spoken-word specialist label like Caedmon which contained some very curious items in its catalogue like the Marcel Marceau album (no, really)—thought there was a market for just strikes me as impossibly unlikely. Surely this was an exceeding abstract joke…

…OH.

No, Caedmon actually produced this baffling object in the 1970s. And, as further proof of its existence…