Since I have drawn such unexpected interest in the subject and power of analogies (and the broader class of mappings they belong to, metaphors), might I suggest
Surfaces & Essences by Douglas Hofstadter (of
Godel, Escher, Bach fame) and Emmanuel Sander. It is a very insightful, powerful, and amusingly self-referential cinderblock-sized tome on how the ability to draw inferences, create and manipulate metaphors, and have a sense for where they do and don’t apply is a central issue for “general artificial intelligence” (you know, the MIT-cantered, Marvin Minsky-fuelled, LISP-encoded “symbolic AI” that eventually plunged into ‘winter’ only to emerge, phoenix-like but neutered, in our ‘modern’ statistics-based Machine/Deep Learning guises).
Analogies are certainly useful. I recall reading that Hawking first had the idea of his eponymous radiation ‘emanating’ from black holes by way of a calculation performed by a Russian physicist (whose name escapes me at the moment) that argued that a sphere of ferromagnetic material should ‘emit’ tiny but theoretically detectable amounts of electromagnetic radiation. I forget the details. But apparently Hawking’s brain drew the analogue between the inverse square laws at play, the virtual particles, and the non-permeability of the objects and set out on his quest for what eventually made him world-famous.
I myself am a prolific, if somewhat irreverent, manufacturer of analogies, metaphors, and euphemisms. I remember the general horror of my family members when I asked great-grandma why she had been moved to “the launch-pad ward”. In my defence, I was six.