Series of crazy coincidences leaves Nintendo fans being told “let me see your masculinity on view in full physical arousal.”

30 years since its original release, Super Mario Bros. 3 remains one of Nintendo’s all-time classics. There’s just so much to love about the game: the Goomba stomping, the coin collecting, the…

…pussy grabbing?

Atlanta resident and Twitter user @brandokay recently received his copy of author Alyse Knorr’s Super Mario Bros. 3, which documents the inspirations, development, and legacy of the 8-bit video game. The cover was fine, with the title and writer’s name sharing space with an image of a racoon, likely a salute to the Tanooki Suit power-up that debuted in the game (and was many Westerners first introduction to the real-life Japanese tanuki). But once he turned to the pages inside…

https://twitter.com/brandokay/status/1059487738901262336

…he was greeted with “GRABBING PUSSY,” all in capital-letter large-size print, and the name of a different author entirely, Karen Finley. Delving deeper into the book, he came across a poem that begins with “Let me take a pic of my dick,” chronicling the famed photo-sharing fetish of disgraced American politician Anthony Weiner.

So how did this happen? Well, the Super Mario Bros. 3 book is published by Los Angeles-based Boss Fight Books, which specializes in scholarly looks at famous video games. Meanwhile, on the other side of the spectrum both geographically and thematically, New York’s OR Books focuses on literature that promotes “progressive change in politics, culture and…business.”

OR Books does indeed publish a book called Grabbing Pussy, which it describes as:

“a breathless cascade of poetry and prose, [in which] celebrated performance artist Karen Finley here lays bare the psychosexual obsessions that have burst to the surface of today’s American politics.”

Boss Fight and OR Books don’t own their own printing presses, and they both contracted with the same printing company to physically produce the books in question. Because the books had the same paper size/type, they were scheduled immediately next to each other in the printing queue, and a number of Super Mario Bros. 3 covers got crammed full of Grabbing Pussy. Ordinarily, having the wrong contents should make the resulting book too thick or too thin for its binding, and quality control would easily notice when the books coming off the line had covers that were too floppy or engorged. However, in a wild coincidence, both Knorr’s Super Mario Bros. 3 and Finley’s Grabbing Pussy are exactly 176 pages long, meaning that with their covers closed, the faulty books looked exactly like a properly prepared one would.

Thankfully, while the Super Mario franchise is beloved by gamers of all ages, the in-depth academic examination in Knorr’s book is squarely targeted at grown-up fans, so it’s unlikely any Nintendo-loving kids were traumatized when they came to the passage of Grabbing Pussy that says “Please let me see your masculinity on view in full physical arousal.” Those who ended up with the unintended hybrids actually now have a bit of a collector’s item, and while no reports have come in, there’s also the chance that someone out there has a copy of Grabbing Pussy that’s full of interesting Super Mario Bros. 3 tidbits.

Sources: Twitter/@brandokay via Anime News Network/Lynzee Loveridge, Twitter/@BossFightBooks, Boss Fight Books, OR Books