Robert Brent

Excellent book: full of a wide range of home chemical experiments for the budding Mad Scientist.
I enjoyed it greatly when I was 12: it's sad that kids today are fobbed off with pathetic chemical-free chemistry sets and books describing nothing more dangerous than making slime (PVA glue and Borax)

I recently discovered that this is, in fact, an English reprint of The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments. http://www.librarything.com/work/1525793
This is hardbound, a number of colour photographs have been added, and the spelling has been Anglicised, but the rest of the text and illustrations appears to be identical to the original book. (I realised this when looking at a pdf of the Golden Book and noticing that the illustrations seemed strangely familiar)… (meer)

This book is written for teenagers. It explains how to set up a home chemistry lab and conduct over 200 simple experiments. It is the bible for any young chemist-in-training.

According to OCLC, only 126 copies of this book exist in libraries worldwide. There is an urban legend floating around on the Internet that this book was banned by the government and pulled from library shelves.

Used copies sell for $100-$700 from Amazon.com and eBay.com. Alternatively, you can download a PDF copy of the book for free as I did. See
http://chemistry.about.com/library/goldenchem.pdf

Why isn't it still in print? Perhaps it had to do with concerns about safety.

There was an incident in 1995 near Detroit in which a teenage chemist named David Hahn attempted to build a nuclear breeder reactor in his backyard shed. He was inspired in part by reading The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments. A book by Ken Silverstein called The Radioactive Boyscout tells the whole story, but you can find a summary on Wikipedia. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hahn

Hahn, an Eagle Scout, got a merit badge in Atomic Energy. He spent years tinkering in his home chemistry lab which sometimes resulted in small explosions and other mishaps. He tried to collect samples of every element in the periodic table, including the radioactive ones.… (meer)