Schott's Original Miscellany is the surprise bestseller of the season, feeding readers' insatiable appetite for trivia. Bernice Harrison goes in pursuit of its author
What is it about Schott's Original Miscellany? Even its author, Ben Schott, says he can't describe it, but his quaint hardback book full of the most peculiar and esoteric trivia is the surprise best-seller this Christmas.
Already in its fourth reprint, it proves the theory that everyone loves lists. And what lists. From a page full of phobias (alliumphobia, garlic; optophobia, opening one's eyes) to the Beaufort Scale. A list of medical shorthand is opposite a list of the football World Cup winners (first winner, Uruguay in 1930), and if you fancy quoting Mrs Beeton over the Christmas dinner ("A good manager looks ahead"), there's a list of her most pithy sayings.
"I don't even like trivia," says Schott, sounding slightly bemused by the success of his little book. "I took part in my first pub quiz last week and we came sixth."
Since the book was published in Britain last month, reviewers have speculated on his age and general geekiness. A fairly reasonable view was that the author had to be an 82-year-old retired librarian in a cosy cardie tapping away on an upright Royal in a book-filled garden shed. As it turns out, Schott is a 29-year-old, London-based portrait photographer and Cambridge graduate who hit on the idea for a book of trivia and miscellany two years ago when he made a little trivia-filled booklet to send to his clients as Christmas cards.
The idea went down so well that he spent more than a year expanding on it to make a book. For research, he went mostly to the British Library, online (though not a lot, he says), and asked experts and friends or just generally chanced his arm. For the list of how to say "I love you" in 43 languages, he took to telephoning airports in various countries and explaining to, say, the Polish woman on the line that he wanted to tell his girlfriend that he loved her in Polish and could she please translate.
"I love knowing that there are other spheres of knowledge that are all around us in our everyday life," he says. "Like when you're driving down the motorway behind a lorry, I'm intrigued that the hazard sign on the back with all those numbers actually means something." (Page 24: 3 means if it catches fire, foam has to be used; E means a public safety hazard).
"I wanted to take dull lists, like the one about wine bottle sizes and see if there was a way of expanding it and having a bit of fun," Schott continues. "So I knew, for example, that a jeroboam of champagne is four bottles when it's champagne, but who knew it was six when it's Bordeaux?"
Some of the lists are particularly British, including the words of the national anthem and a list of the English monarchs. Not that all those lists of official suppliers to Queen Elizabeth, London clubs and colour specifications for the Union Jack has deterred Irish buyers - in its first four weeks on sale here it sold 10,000 copies.
"I think British people have a tremendous appetite for information for information's sake," says Schott. "If you look at quizzes like University Challenge or Countdown, it's all about that. And even at the end of, I don't know, say 30 rounds, all the winner gets is a plate or something. In an American quiz, they'd get a million dollars."
Having written it, Schott found his quirky book far too difficult to describe in a pitch to likely publishers so he designed it and had 50 printed privately. "I wanted it to look like it had been around forever, like Pears Encyclopedia or Old Moore's Almanac so it's deliberately old-fashioned."
He had intended to stop the trivia around the end of the first World War and stay anonymous so that readers might indeed presume that it was some sort of "found object". But he couldn't quite resist modern miscellany, so curiosities range from "coffee shop slang" (skinny, with semi-skimmed milk; wild, with whipped cream) to the entire catalogue of Carry On films, with particular note of the ones in which Hattie Jacques appeared.
Once publishers could see the book, there was huge interest and Schott eventually went with Bloomsbury. The success (125,000 sales already in the UK) has brought two further miscellany book commissions, one on food and drink, another on sport, and he's due to start a weekly column on trivia in the Daily Telegraph.
"I don't really know why, but there does seem to be a tremendous appetite for miscellany," Schott says.
Schott's Original Miscellany, by Ben Schott, is published by Bloomsbury, £9.99
Things you absolutely don't need to know . . . but you might quite like to . . .
It's a business of ferrets; a muster of peacocks; and a clutch of eggs.
Curious deaths of Burmese kings: Minrekyawswa (1417) was crushed to death by his own elephant.
The Statue of Liberty is 305ft 1in high, her index finger is 8ft long and her mouth is 3ft wide.
The term "draconian" derives from Draco, the archon of Athens in c.621BC. Draco's laws "written in blood" prescribed death for even trivial crimes.
Tongue-twisters: Eleven benevolent elephants; I wish to wash my Irish wristwatch.
Queen Victoria set a standard of mourning so that the death of a husband required two to three years' mourning; a wife, three months; a parent or child, one year; siblings and grandparents, six months.
English is littered with words from other languages such as pundit and chintz from Sanskrit, admiral and alcove from Arabic, chilli and chocolate from Aztec, and saga and geyser from Icelandic.
The slice of processed cheese in a McDonald's Big Mac contains: vegetarian Cheddar cheese, water, butter, milk proteins, natural cheese flavouring, emulsifying salts (E331 trisodium citrate, E450 diphosphates, E452 polyphosphates), lactose, salt, preservative and colouring.
The main course for dinner on the Titanic on April 14th, 1912 was a choice of filet mignons lili, sautè of chicken Lyonnaise and vegetable marrow farcie.
One thing you might need to know at this time of year: Santa's reindeers are Comet, Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Cupid, Donner, Blitzen and, of course, Rudolph.