The world's most boring publication

A classic from 1955, courtesy of the RAND Corporation: A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates. It's hard to believe that, at one point in time, a book containing nothing more than an obscenely long string of random digits was a genuinely significant contribution to humankind, but be not deceived: effective random number generation is hard. It's hard enough to require a 131-page specification courtesy of the National Institute of Standards and Technology. And in in an era when one couldn't count on having a cheap, fast PC to run well-established algorithms on, a book like this was indeed a blessing. I'm tempted to buy this to read on airplanes, just to creep out the person sitting next to me.