FAQ

Right here on our web site! Go directly to our store for the best sales and discounts. In the USA, Uncle John’s Bathroom Readers are available at Barnes & Noble, Amazon.com, Borders, Waldenbooks, Borders, Costco, BJ’s, Sam’s Club, Walmart, as well as many local bookstores. If your favorite bookstore doesn’t carry our books, ask them to “Go with the Flow” and order some.

Want to find out the status of your order? Find out if it’s shipped? Determine when it will get to you? We want to help! Check out our Customer Service page for detailed specifics, but the short story is: email customerhelp@theretailerplace.com.

Right now, we can’t  ship to Canadian or international addresses. We’re working to fix that and bring the books to our friends worldwide, but in the meantime, you can order find our books in other ways.

Our books can be ordered worldwide through Amazon.com, or you can try:

Canada: Chapters, or Amazon.ca

UK: Amazon.co.uk

We’re not presently hiring, but you never know. If you really want a job at the BRI, send your resume to mail@bathroomreader.com. Should the need ever arise, we’ll contact you.

If you’d like to become a freelance contributor to the BRI, send your resume and original, unedited writing samples to mail@bathroomreader.com. Or you can send in samples via snail-mail to:

Bathroom Readers’ Institute
P.O. Box 1117
Ashland, OR 97520

Send your request to mail@bathroomreader.com. Be sure to include what you want to reprint, where you found it, deadlines, and intended usage.

To find the answer to this, plus more about the strange world of the Bathroom Readers’ Institute, check out our About Us page.

Yes, we have an index. But, unfortunately, it’s only available to our writers and researchers.

Here’s the short answer: No. Well…sort of. Here’s the long answer as to why: After releasing or 7th volume, we decided to do The Best of Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader, and because it uses some previously published material, we don’t consider it a “volume” (but it is the 8th book). The following year, we published our 8th volume of all-new material, Uncle John’s Ultimate Bathroom Reader (the 8th volume and 9th book.) In 1997 we published the 9th volume/10th book, Uncle John’s Giant 10th Anniversary Bathroom Reader. We didn’t want to make things confusing by printing the words “9th edition” on our 10th anniversary book. (Why that would have been confusing, we’re not sure any more, but it was then.) Welcome to the warped world of Uncle John!

Unfortunately, we just don’t have the time or the resources to research and answer every question that comes in. Our team is extremely busy producing new books and due to the large volume of books we have produced, we don’t have the resources to do additional research. If it is an article suggestion, feel free to email us and we will add it to our suggestion files.

To make a Bathroom Reader, our writers and researchers use hundreds of sources to come up with thousands of facts. Our material comes from newspapers (Wall Street Journal, Oregonian, USA Today, etc.), from magazines (Time, National Geographic, Newsweek, etc.), as well as from a humongous heap of books, trivia, reference, origins, quotes, you name it, we probably have it. Every now and then we glean information from the Internet, but always verify what we find. Some of our ideas and information also come from you, our faithful readers.

Here’s our disclaimer: Every bit of information we put into our books comes from what we’ve found to be reliable sources. Ninety-nine percent of the time they’re accurate — and so are we — and one percent of the time they’re wrong — and so are we. In addition, what’s commonly known as fact one year can invariably become a myth the next year. That’s the crux of the trivia business. Know that we do our best.

These should be submitted to mailto: mail@bathroomreader.com.

For submissions, make sure you send along your sources.

For corrections, make sure you include the name of the Bathroom Reader and the page number you found it on. If it’s a factual error, include your sources. We input the corrections when we do periodic reprints of the books.

In rare cases, we will award the submitter of valuable information with a free book.

You’re not going crazy! The WD-40 article isn’t in the book. We design and print our covers long before the book itself is finished. Uncle John decided to pull the article at the last minute, forgetting that he put it on the back cover. Later printings have a different, accurate back cover. But we finally got around to publishing it, though. It’s in Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Wondeful World of Odd.

There are two possibilities. The first is that you’re using the wrong password. If you’ve forgotten your password, just go to the Sign In page, enter your email address and click on “Forgot your password.” Your password will then be sent to you via e-mail.

The other possibility is that you’re using your old BRI Member account, which no longer works with our new store.

We’ve upgraded the store to make the process of getting books from us faster, easier, and smoother. But of course with anything new, there’s always a bit of tweaking that still has to happen. What that means for you, our loyal fans, is that even if you’re a returning customer you’ll need to set up a new account within the new store.

You can do it the first time you place an order. You’ll see this screen:

Click on Create New Account, and you’ll be set to go.

Or you can do it now, while you’re thinking about it, even if you aren’t quite ready to place an order. Go to the Register page and you can sign right up.

Once you do this, you’ll be able to see any orders you place with the new store, track the shipments, see the status of any backordered books, and manage your personal information.

Because this is a new system, orders placed through the old store will no longer be visible to you. We know it’s a pain, but if you have any questions about those old orders—that’s any orders placed before February 15, 2010—you can contact orders@bathroomreader.com, and we’ll look into them personally.