The Curious Appeal of Miscellanea

Facts are fun, though it is not obvious why this should be so. Every day, the newspaper brings new unhappy facts to the door: Tap water in Greenville, Miss., is brown; more than 100 instances of misconduct have been alleged in the Afghan election; the swine flu is more likely to strike schoolchildren.

And while the newspapers are on their way to financial ruin, it’s not because people don’t want information. It is because information has proliferated like Weimar bank notes, with everyone shoveling it into wheelbarrows, till the old economic arrangements have collapsed. There are 3 million English-language entries on Wikipeda, according to the Wikipedia entry on Wikipedia.

Yet professionally compiled books of facts are thriving. In 2003, a petite, meticulously designed volume titled “Schott’s Original Miscellany” arrived in the United States from Britain - listing Earth’s atmospheric layers next to sumo weight classes, diagramming palmistry lines and the method of tying a bow tie. The “Original” of the title was part of author Ben Schott’s mock-archaic tone, but it also turned out to be a prophecy. “There’s more and more of them every year,” said Megan Sullivan, the head buyer at the Harvard Book Store.

Last month, Perigee Books brought out “The World’s Greatest Book of Useless Information,” the fifth “Book of Useless Information” published since that series appeared in 2006. This is not to be confused with the “Essential Book of Useless Information,” due out from Perigee this fall, nor with the unrelated “That Book...of Perfectly Useless Information,” published by Harper in 2004, or its sequels, “This Book...of More Perfectly Useless Information” and “The Other Book...of the Most Perfectly Useless Information.”

The Google toolbar hovers a few inches up and to the right from everyone’s center of
vision, ready to drop a cascade of optimized search results. The text of books can be delivered to a touchscreen mobile phone. And even so, people are going out and buying paper volumes of facts, printed in unchanging ink, to keep on a shelf. What’s behind this seemingly backward turn?

The bit above is from a story in the Boston Globe. They seek answers!