Schott's Original Miscellany [Hardcover]

These are 160 pages pebble dashed with facts, figures, ruminations, clarifications and charts - far, far too many to list here, and anyway it would a precious shame to spoil the consistent serendipity of a whole new page full of things you didn't know and never thought to ask.

A smattering of examples: all the Bond films, complete with names of baddie, girl and motor. How to fold a sari. Which Presidents are on which US banknotes. A potted history of the London Underground. Some Churchillian speech patterns. The deaths of some Burmese Kings.

It's maddeningly addictive, so much so that after a few days spent liberally flicking through you'll notice some worrying changes within yourself. You will start to take an unhealthy interest in such matter as the correct name for cloud formations, the Welsh for 'I love you' and the collective nouns for fowl. You'll be continually fighting the urge to bombard your flatmates / colleagues / newsagent with myriad lists, little-knownances and Queer Things. You may even start to become a Dinner Party Bore, the sort of notable who always knows everything about everything and doesn't mind telling you about it, all night. But, as previously mentioned, in a very good way.

And here's the really good news: because each entry only takes up about half a page, it's very easy indeed to concentrate on. We are the Internet Generation, after all, and we have fostered a healthy lust for highly entertaining, bite sized irreverence. Schott's Original Miscellany is, therefore, entirely and utterly our Sort Of Thing.

Buy one for yourself and another one for each of your friends. They'll thank you for it. Schott's Original Miscellany is a book designed for the toilet but destined to be discussed for years... until the next one comes out.

And it IS entertaining - the chance are that if one topic does not interest you, the next one will. Some are serious (capital cities, commonplace latin), others not (A for 'orses, B for mutton), with most of them lying between these two extremes.

There is the odd mistake, and a few needless omissions (the list of Bond films misses out the two 'unofficial ones', for instance), though there's enough here to make for a book which ultimatley proves to be useful. At least twice in the last week I've said 'I'll go and look it up in Schotts' and found what I was looking for.

It can be made bigger in the future, it could spark off a number of more specific 'offshoot' guides, but for a first attempt, this is a mighty fine attempt to compress an infinite supply of information into one stocking-filler sized text. I won't say you can't put it down, because you can. But you'll probably pick it up again soon enough.

Last week, I arrived at work to find a copy of this book on my desk. A colleague got it for Christmas and brought it in to show me. "It's the kind of thing you'd enjoy", he said.

He was right.

Here is a modern miscellany. I don't know who Ben Schott is, or how he came to write this book, but it is a masterpiece. At first I didn't realise the book was a recent publication, so timeless is the style; I only found out when I saw that the information was entirely up to date.

The book freely mixes trivia with important reference material. It mixes the frivolous with the profound. It touches on almost every subject imaginable. This book is so eclectic that less than a quarter of it duplicates information I already had in my considerable reference library.

True, there are a few errors, here and there - I spotted maybe half a dozen. No matter.

This book should fascinate almost anyone. Buy it now. Buy copies as presents. Buy a spare copy, and keep it in a vacuum-sealed plastic bag - I'm sure a pristine first edition would be very valuable to your grandchildren.