Entries include William McGonagall, a notoriously bad poet, and Teruo Nakamura, a soldier of the Imperial Japanese Army who fought for Japan in World War II until 1974.

The original edition included an application to become a member of the Not Terribly Good Club of Great Britain; however, this was taken out in later editions because the club received over 20,000 applications and closed in 1979 on the grounds that, "Even as failures, we failed"[1] (but not before Pile himself had been expelled from it for publishing a bestseller[2]).

[3] In his second book, The Return of Heroic Failures, published in 1988, Stephen Pile reports that Taiwanese pirates were not aware of this and did not include the erratum slip.

In fact, this second book was named "Η ΤΕΧΝΗ ΤΗΣ ΑΠΟΤΥΧΙΑΣ No1" (The Art of Failure No.

The World of Work Off Duty Law and Order Playing the Game The Cultural Side of Things War and Peace The Business of Politics Love and Marriage The Art of Being Wrong