What is a Fake book. I remember seeing them in music stores. The book type never inspired me to purchase on

Wikipedia gives a rather good explanation. Hope this helps.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fake_book

Yeah, that wikipedia definition is what I always understood they were. Basically, its sheet music on how to play a song so that people will recognize it, but not necessarily exactly how any of the parts were played on the recorded version. Its like covering a song where the goal is to just "remind" the audience of the original, rather than nail the parts exactly. I think they are much more common for piano, where the performer is covering & combining melodic parts that originally may have been played by multiple instruments .