According to Frank Zappa, “You can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline””it helps if you have some kind of football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer.” So leads off Micronations: The Lonely Planet Guide to Home-Made Nations (Lonely Planet, $18.95).

This is not a spoof book like Jetlag Travel Guides' Molvania. Rather, it's a guide to extreme reality. However ridiculous it may be, people the world over have declared their own nations, and by gosh, Lonely Planet will lead you to them.

Creating your own nation actually isn't that complicated. According to the 1933 Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States, a nation needs only four things to exist: permanent population, defined territory, government, and capacity to enter into relations with other states. (However, your nation won't necessarily be recognized by other nations.)

The 40-odd nations profiled were created for different reasons. Hutt River Province Principality was founded by a wheat farmer who, disgruntled over agricultural policy, turned his western Australian property into a nation. The Gay and Lesbian Kingdom of the Coral Sea Islands was formed in 2004 on deserted sandbars off the Queensland coast as a reaction to Australia's decision to ban same-sex marriage. The nation of Lovely was created as an extended joke for a BBC series called How to Start Your Own Country. Lovely consists solely of comedian Danny Wallace's London flat. (LP helpfully maps out the floor plan.)

Despite (or because of) the absurdity, this is a fun book to browse. It's set up in traditional LP style with sections like “Getting There and Away” and “Government and Politics”. Not surprisingly, most micronations' economies are based on trade in postage stamps.