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Sheridan Simove publishes a book. Oh, and it's completely blank

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Sheridan Simove has led a pretty colourful career.

A former senior producer on Big Brother and The Big Breakfast, who has worked at Disney World, Florida, in 2009 he made the headlines when he changed his name to God by deed poll.

Now he is back in the limelight following the publication of his new book - there are no words or pictures.

Titled What Every Man Thinks About Apart From Sex, the paperback contains 200 blank pages.

Mr Simove, known as Shed, runs a company selling novelty products. He tells People: "I wanted to combine the idea of a novelty gifts with a book. I decided to create one where the front cover was the setup of a joke and the blank pages inside were the punchline - 'nothing'."

He is hoping the result will become an Amazon bestseller. The 39-year-old previously wrote Ideas Man, which did have text and took him five years. But he is confident his latest work, which took him 10 days to publish, will outsell it in a matter of weeks.

But it has not all been plain sailing for Mr Simove, who lives in south-west London and is an Oxford University graduate. He says: "VAT is not payable on books in the UK but despite my book being printed by a book printer and accepted on Amazon, the UK Inland Revenue have deemed it as a 'non-book' because it doesn't contain text or illustrations. So now they are classing it as a 'novelty gift' and annoyingly, VAT is payable on these products." He adds: "I'd find it pretty upsetting if my blank book did outsell my non-blank one, which took so much longer but I suppose it would be deeply amusing - a comment on today's society and how books are becoming less attractive to people, maybe."

Amazon.co.uk

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