Bloomsbury USA
August 2003
How to say "I love you" in 43 different languages, including Zulu and Braille; the taxonomy of cattle-branding; a table of international clothes-washing symbols; the Glasgow coma scale; and a listing of all the James Bond films (thus far), complete with an itemized listing of the year of the film, who played Bond, the main villain, the Bond Girl, and the key car. All this and much is at your fingertips when you crack open Ben Schott's Original Miscellany.
Ben Schott admits at the outset that his Miscellany is by no means exhaustive or even relevant. It is, however, a whole lot of fun. Perhaps the fun lies in the randomness of the entries. Open the book to pages 86-87 and you get Bed Sizes, Compound Plurals, Wives of Henry VIII, Tugs of War, How to Wrap a Sari, and Noble Gases. Did you know that "no fun" is slang for decaffeinated in Coffee Shop parlance? That Genuine Risk won the Kentucky Derby in 1980? How about six words with all the vowels in alphabetical order?
See what I mean? It's just fun.
It has stuff you may have learned in school - conversion tables, cloud types, the names of classical column types (Ionic, Doric, Corinthian…).
August 2003
How to say "I love you" in 43 different languages, including Zulu and Braille; the taxonomy of cattle-branding; a table of international clothes-washing symbols; the Glasgow coma scale; and a listing of all the James Bond films (thus far), complete with an itemized listing of the year of the film, who played Bond, the main villain, the Bond Girl, and the key car. All this and much is at your fingertips when you crack open Ben Schott's Original Miscellany.
Ben Schott admits at the outset that his Miscellany is by no means exhaustive or even relevant. It is, however, a whole lot of fun. Perhaps the fun lies in the randomness of the entries. Open the book to pages 86-87 and you get Bed Sizes, Compound Plurals, Wives of Henry VIII, Tugs of War, How to Wrap a Sari, and Noble Gases. Did you know that "no fun" is slang for decaffeinated in Coffee Shop parlance? That Genuine Risk won the Kentucky Derby in 1980? How about six words with all the vowels in alphabetical order?
See what I mean? It's just fun.
It has stuff you may have learned in school - conversion tables, cloud types, the names of classical column types (Ionic, Doric, Corinthian…).
But it also has stuff too far out to have ever entered your mind: the details of the British hat tax, a listing of the provisions with which the Titanic was loaded, bonsai tree terminology, and a lexicon of the Navajo Code Talkers.
Schott's Original Miscellany is a small book, much smaller than you'd expect for what's packed inside. It's about the size of an average paperback, perhaps smaller. It's the kind of book you should leave lying around on a coffee table or perhaps in the bathroom. It's not something you'll ever read cover to cover, but flipping through it now and again is a treat, like opening a box of cracker jacks to find the surprise.
Schott's Original Miscellany is a small book, much smaller than you'd expect for what's packed inside. It's about the size of an average paperback, perhaps smaller. It's the kind of book you should leave lying around on a coffee table or perhaps in the bathroom. It's not something you'll ever read cover to cover, but flipping through it now and again is a treat, like opening a box of cracker jacks to find the surprise.
