You Could Look It Up (65 page)

As a result,
Guinness
has stopped accepting some records—those in “life-threatening categories”—for fear that ambitious adventurers will be prepared to risk their lives for the immortality that comes with an entry in
Guinness
.
12
On the advice of physicians, and perhaps advice of counsel,
Guinness
no longer accepts records related to headstands, sleep deprivation, or hunger strikes; gone are the records for smoking the largest number of cigarettes or chugging the greatest amount of alcohol. Even when records are not rejected for being dangerous, though, many are omitted because there is no end to what ingenious aspirants can make up. About sixty-five thousand claims come to the
Guinness
offices every year, but only about one in seven is even considered. As a journalist explains the book’s policy for inclusion,

Many are too specific. Most People Crammed into a ’63 Chevy? Sorry, but Guinness accepts car-cramming records only for “iconic” cars such as the Volkswagen Beetle. Oldest Pit Bull? Guinness does not categorize pet records by breed. “People often try to claim a record by complicating it,” says Guinness’ Keeper of the Records, Stewart “The Oracle” Newport: “They’ll say they have the record for Longest Standing on the Corner of Such and Such a Street While Playing a Banjo.”
13

And which was the fastest game bird, the golden plover or the grouse? Neither, it turns out. The wood pigeon holds the record.

The
Guinness Book
contains information no one particularly needs to know, but it is nonetheless a genuine compendium of superlative information. You may not need to know the cost of the world’s most expensive hamburger, but if you want to know it, you know you can turn to the latest
Guinness
for the answer ($5,000 at Juicys Outlaw Grill).

A few reference books go even further than Guinness in the direction of gloriously unconnected trivia, and the perfect example of this genre may be
Schott’s Original Miscellany
, described on the title page as “Conceived, written, and designed by BEN SCHOTT.” As the author’s website advertises, the book is an “indispensable collection of essential trivia, uncommon knowledge and vital irrelevancies.” However irrelevant, it has kept browsers happy for more than a decade; as the review in
Newsweek
put it, “Part encyclopedia, part anthology, part lexicon, the book is a collection of inconsequential tidbits that you never knew, never thought to ask, but will love knowing.” The
Sunday Telegraph
was similar: “This bizarre little book manages to be both totally useless and nearly indispensable.”

Schott’s Original Miscellany
is the reason the word
quirky
was invented. It opens with a meditation on its own form:

An encyclopaedia? A dictionary? An almanac? An anthology? A lexicon? A treasury? A commonplace? An amphigouri? A vade-mecum?

Well … yes.
Scott’s Original Miscellany
is all of these and, of course, none.

Its declared purpose is “to gather the flotsam and jetsam of the conversational tide,” and while it “makes very few claims to be exhaustive, authoritative, or even practical,” it does “claim to be essential.”
14

Ben Schott—not yet thirty when the
Miscellany
appeared—was a photographer with a politics degree from Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. He has done a good job cultivating an air of mystery, so there are vague rumors about his collection of cufflinks and his 1967 Mercedes. He used to send handmade Christmas cards to friends that took the form of little booklets of trivia. The cards suggested the book, which Schott not only wrote but designed and typeset. The small print and eccentric layout, reminiscent of Victorian self-help books, are among the most distinctive features of the book, at once beautiful and frenzied. The manic miscellaneity evokes Victorian hodgepodges like
Beeton’s Dictionary of Universal Information
(1870–73).

It is tempting to say that the
Miscellany
includes facts like the weight classes of sumo wrestlers, the names of people on the cover of
Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
(Carl Jung, Bob Dylan, Marlene Dietrich, Karl Marx), the months on the French revolutionary calendar, and who supplies bagpipes to the Queen—but what facts are “like” these? The first few pages do, however, give a taste of the rest. The main text opens with “Golf Stroke Nomenclature,” then moves without transition to a discussion of the Hat Tax, followed immediately by a set of “Characteristics of Living Things” (movement, respiration, sensitivity …), and then abruptly segues into “Shoelace Length”—and so on. The curious reader comes across the Victorian rules for mourning, with the proviso that widows were expected to mourn their husbands two to three years, while widowers could get on just three months after their wives’ deaths. They are not the only deaths to be featured: see also “Curious Deaths of Some Burmese Kings,” including Anawratha, “gored by a buffalo during a military campaign,” and Tabinshweti, “beheaded by his chamberlains while searching for a fictitious white elephant.”

Schott is drawn to anything that can be numbered: Isaac Asimov’s three laws of robotics, the thirty
Carry On
films, the Three Wise Men, the five regular Platonic solids, the three-to-fifteen-point range of the Glasgow Coma Scale. Astronomical numbers are even better: the odds of a royal flush in poker are 649,739 to 1. Any set that is (a) limited and (b) unexpected has appeal, such as a complete list of Bond Girls or all the recognized sizes of icebergs and eggs. He revels in obscure words, as
in his list of phobias including pteronophobia (tickling with feathers), xenoglossophobia (foreign languages), scorodophobia (garlic), as well as in his tour through various techniques of divination, including geloscopy (the interpretation of laughter), bletonism (analyzing currents of water), and sciomancy (shadows or ghosts).

Part of the book’s charm is its
incompleteness
. A comprehensive list of patron saints would be too useful, so instead we get a defiantly arbitrary selection: wine growers claim St. Joseph; gravediggers, St. Anthony; bricklayers, St. Stephen; syphilitics, St. George. Other entries get their allure from being categories that no one ever thought of as categories before, such as the list of “Notable Belgians,” or things proverbs say you can’t do (have it both ways, have your cake and eat it, get blood out of a stone). Instructions are always fun: Schott will teach you how to wrap a sari, calculate bra sizes, and convert shoe sizes (a British 9 is an American 10½ or a European 42.5). Historical trivia is always welcome, like the first-class dinner menu for the
Titanic
on April 14, 1912, and lengths and opening dates of the lines on the London Underground.

The book came out on November 4, 2002, and initially got little publicity. When the early reviewers got their copies, though, it was love at first sight. Stuart Jeffries’s
Guardian
review was one of the first to celebrate the “publishing sensation of the year,” and two days later Robert McCrum published a review under the title “God Bless You, Mr Schott, for Your Pointless yet Perfect Miscellany,” calling the book “without doubt the oddest, nay maddest, and possibly merriest, title you will come across in a long day’s march through the shimmering desert of contemporary publishing… . strangely unputdownable … Schott is a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles, a mad magpie at large in the wide world of facts and words … the work of a jackdaw mind.”
15
These reviews and others like them made it the hit of the Christmas book buying season, and over the next four weeks the book sold more than two hundred thousand copies.

Schott continues to cultivate a mysterious public image. He was voted one of
GQ
’s Men of the Year in 2003, but he turned down the honor, as he turned down an invitation to a party with Elton John. After the
Original Miscellany
, he turned his attention to matters culinary, with
Schott’s Food & Drink Miscellany
. “The London ‘miscellanist’ returns,”
wrote
Publishers Weekly
, “bestowing upon hungry readers every random thing they’ve ever wondered about the culinary arts and then some… . Servants’ wages, rates of digestion, blessings for wine and bread, dining times for monks, cognac nomenclature, Laotian cooking measures, ways to ask for the bill in 22 languages, microbial count in raw meat, Latin names for herbs—Schott addresses all these subjects and more, hopping between completely useless (though always fascinating) information and eminently practical tidbits.”
16

Reviewing
Schott
for the
Christian Science Monitor
, Mark Luce linked the two works of this chapter: “The last time I experienced such a response to a compendium of useless information was in fifth grade, when a 1980 edition of ‘The Guinness Book of World Records’ landed in my grubby mitts.”
17
Guinness
and
Schott
are part of a genre that includes Michael Powell’s
Back in the Day: 101 Things Everyone Used to Know How to Do
,
Mental Floss Presents Condensed Knowledge: A Deliciously Irreverent Guide to Feeling Smart Again
, and
Slate
magazine’s
Explainer
. The Library of Congress has assigned some of these the brilliantly nonspecific subject heading “Handbooks, vade-mecums, etc.”

Their shared success is noteworthy. “More intriguing than any mere fact in Schott’s,” JoAnn Gutin observed on its first appearance, “is the philosophical question raised by its popularity. In A.D. 2003, when anyone with a high-speed Internet connection can get the basics of any subject within 10 seconds, does the world need collections like this?” Her conclusion: “From an informational standpoint, probably not.”
18
Perhaps the ready availability of so much information, when any idle curiosity can be settled with only a few seconds’ labor, makes books about nothing special—that is to say, things we would never search for—all the more desirable. They remind us that reports of the death of hard-copy reference books, even in the age of Google and Wikipedia, are considerably exaggerated.

EPILOGUE