Trivia!

The quintessence of it

Schott’s Original Miscellany by Ben Schott

Publishing sensations come and go and mostly, they go. Warehouses are full of them, remainder bins overstuffed. Will our grandchildren have heard of Richard Osman? Almost certainly not. And lucky them. Lucky, lucky them.

If you missed a bestseller the first time around, it’s common to wonder what all the hype was about. But sometimes going back can be fun. Ben Schott, a man with a duel interest in intriguing bite-size pieces of information — schema, rhymes, rules, lists of proper nouns — and somewhat antique typographical design, produced the Original Miscellany as a one-off and as an unsolicited product. It was snapped up by a publisher, Bloomsbury, and sold like hot cakes. This was an era — the early part of this century — when people didn’t watch loops and Reels and TikToks which start with someone saying ‘Oh my GOSH guys, did you know that …’ and so on for their information. Nor was there a Wikipedia to graze on autistically for hours, as everyone of my own age did when they were children with nothing to do.

A printed book filled with trivia — and there were many of them, from The A to Z of Almost Everything to The Celebrated Pedestrian and others — could still sell brilliantly and provide an entrée to pub conversations across the land.

I don’t know if you knew this, but you see, I heard somewhere that — and on and on.

There was a little serendipity in opening something purposely collated.

For children of my age, there was the Dangerous Book for Boys and its various spin-offs and copies. People liked being told things in small pieces by a hardback item. It’s the Guinness Book of Records syndrome. Did you know who ate the most cream horns while riding a donkey backwards up K2?

It’s like everything. Pub quizzes. Trivia. Only trivial people may like trivia, as I was more than once told. But there must be a lot of trivial people if that’s true.

I received the Quintessential Miscellany as a young boy and loved it — although I don’t believe I ever read the whole thing. A few of the items it contained have stayed with me: the conversions of various measures from practical to impractical. A poem or two about taking cups of wine for one’s constitution’s sake. An approximation of how a reveller would order each of what totalled at eight glasses of brandy and water with increasingly slurred, hyperbolic speech.

Information is a commodity we don’t all care for. Some people know what they know and like it very much, thanks all the same. I have had more than one conversation recently about the fact that some people just don’t ask other people questions.

If something was really important, they might reason, you’d simply tell me, wouldn’t you? I don’t do it out of nastiness, you know.

An American president was said to have told someone, that ‘I don’t learn very much when I’m talking,’ although American presidents as a whole learn so little one wonders if the phrase might have been said, like an artillery barrage, for effect.

Some people are naturally curious characters and largely, they are rare and disliked. Many a father, when I was a boy, tired of the ingenuous questions asked by their children. Why is the sky blue? Why can’t I lift this thing? Why is that wet? Where do we go when we’re asleep?

You can ask Google; you can ask Jeeves — that’s the children were told, in my hearing. The computer exists to answer questions like this. And not me. I’ve just had a long day at work. It’s not really my problem at the moment.

One problem with collections of information like Schott’s is that they tend to be arbitrary: the solidification of a single author’s (or team of authors’) perspective. Their likes and dislikes. What they consider interesting. Some might think that restrictive.

But mull it and tend another way. In the past, before publishing culture became a slow, lumbering, tedious monolith and the newspapers took over and took charge and then began to expire, individuals with no oversight, answering to few people (perhaps just their printer), wrote journals of their very own. Dr Johnson, Addison and Steele, the Boxiana of Pierce Egan. We are not better off now these things have either ceased to exist or migrated first to the blogs in the Old Internet and then to newsletters like this one. We are not better off.

An individual perspective matters. Even if its subject remains trivial. Quintessentially so.