A New Jersey kid turns his Batman comic book addiction into a grown-up gig as producer of The Dark Knight Rising. A Scottish misfit keeps his eye firmly on a weird prize as he travels 2,000 miles to gather parts so he can build a toaster by hand. Orville and Wilbur Wright sound like drunken frat brothers as they post alt-universe status updates on Facebook. And Tim Burton muses about how his miserable, outcast youth informed one of filmdom's most distinctive bodies of ghoulish work.

These are just a few of the stories that are piling up fast as falling leaves this autumn in a new batch of eccentric books. Check the gallery above for 10 reasons to take a break from the computer screen and curl up with humanity's most enduring handheld information-delivery system.

Images courtesy participating publishers.

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Author: Antoine de Baecque

Big idea: Filmmaker Burton sits down with de Baecque, former editor in chief of France's prestigious Cahiers du Cinema, to dissect the back story behind each of his movies.

Sample text: "Humour is the essential basis of my work. And yet I've never been very good at making people laugh. As a child, I was much too self-effacing for that. I tried to do funny drawings or little comic films in Super 8, but they didn't make anyone laugh. My humour was rather twisted, and the deep incomprehension with which it was met gradually made it even more weird and offbeat."

Publisher:Phaidon (November)