250,000 digits
OK, the book.
Tafeln gleichverteilter Zufallszahlen, Band I. "Tables of uniformly distributed random numbers, volume one." Akademie-Fachverlag, Berlin, 1962. Grey linen cover, 212 pages, smells like a basement in the best way.
If you're not a nerd: before computers could produce randomness on demand, scientists needed random numbers for sampling, simulations, statistics. So someone would generate them once, carefully, and print them in a book. The famous one is RAND's A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates (1955), which has some of the funniest Amazon reviews ever written.
Mine is the East German cousin. 250,000 digits in blocks of five, generated (says the foreword) from the noise of an electronic diode at the Institut für Angewandte Stochastik in Adlershof.
Of course I typed a few pages into Python and tested them. Chi-square, runs test, the usual. They're fine. As random as they're supposed to be.
The foreword is signed Dr. U. Brenneke and Prof. H. Lindqvist, and ends with one line I keep rereading:
Band II befindet sich in Vorbereitung.
"Volume II is in preparation."
So there's a second volume, and for some reason I want it, even though it's just another 250,000 digits.