Every Friday, there arrives in my e-mail a brief missive from Schott's Miscellany (explanation in due course). It contains information of the following sort: that "skin and blister" is Cockney rhyming slang for "sister," that pogonophobia is fear not of cartoon possums but of beards, and that the 30th wedding anniversary is called the pearl (set among the swine who have failed to last that long). I think it safe to say that you, gentle reader, were unaware that at least three kings of Burma were killed by elephants: If you must know, and I think you must, Uzana in 1254 and Minrekyawswa in 1417 were trampled, while in 1423 Razadarit was killed by untimely entanglement in a rope with which he was lassoing elephants.
In common with many boys, I took readily to the collection of more or less pointless information, an early indicator of a lifelong devotion to trivia. I'd pore over the multi-volume Book of Knowledge on my parents' bookshelf, filing away for no purpose information that seemed somehow crucial. For instance, dreaming of Africa, I learned how to distinguish Grevy's Zebra from the two other species: The largest and rarest of zebras, they have the narrowest stripes and are unique in not forming permanent attachments to others of their kind. Or I'd want to know just how far beneath the sea William Beebe descended in his then remarkable, now primitive, Bathysphere on Aug. 15, 1934 (it was, for the record, 3,028 feet).
For those with such an unquenchable thirst for random knowledge, Ben Schott is a godsend — or maybe a god. Schott is a London photographer described on the website www.miscellanies.info/ as dividing his time between Highgate and the British Library. But he is really a miscellanist, a collector and dispenser of trivia both somewhat familiar and resolutely arcane.
When it appeared in 2002, Schott's Original Miscellany (Bloomsbury, 158 pint-sized pages, $23.95) caused a small sensation. Who wouldn't want to know the 33 degrees of Freemasonry (my favourite is #25, Chevalier of the Brazen Serpent)? What Churchillian could resist the catalogue of the master orator's rhetorical devices ("To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war" is, for instance, an example of paronomasia, the use of similar sounding words or phrases to create an effect)? And any romantic will welcome a chance to say "I love you" in languages from Arabic ("Ohhe-buk") to Zulu ("Ngiya kuthanda").
The book sold like hotcakes (a phrase obscure to me until I looked it up and learned that it probably arose in Victorian England and referred to the morning rush on fresh and tempting baking). And speaking of hotcakes, it spurred a second volume, Schott's Food & Drink Miscellany (Bloomsbury, 159 pages equally wee pages, $23.95). If you want to know about fugu poisoning (the toxin in some blowfish is more than 1,000 times as potent as cyanide, making brave/foolhardy Japanese diners the equivalent of skydivers with army-surplus parachutes), desire artery-clogging recipes for Christmas pudding (Mrs. Beeton's), want to know which zoo animals were eaten during the 1870 siege of Paris (least appetizing: the self-explanatory Le chat flanqué de rats), require Brillat-Savarin's rules for dining ("Let the men have wit without pretension, and the woman pleasant without being coquettes"), or desperately seek a list of Australian beer glass sizes by district (largest, at 40 oz., is Queensland's Jug), then this book will be nectar and ambrosia to you. Here are helpful household hints, such as how to clean ostrich feathers or to deter mice: they apparently can't abide the smell of peppermint.
Naturally, such success will breed flattering imitation. One charming new trivial (in the best sense) entry is Essential Militaria, by Nicholas Hobbes (McArthur & Co., 161 pages, $24.95). Here you will learn of the eight wounds sustained by Alexander the Great (via cleaver, arrow, stone, sword and catapult), the names of war gods and goddesses in various cultures (Camulus for the Celts, Hachiman for the Japanese), ill treatment of prisoners from the Battle of Aegospotami between Athens and Sparta in 405 BC to Viet Cong abuse of U.S. PoWs, but not yet the enormities of Abu Ghraib. You will not want to venture onto the armchair battlefield without it.
Then there's The Language Report, by Susie Dent (Oxford University Press, a genre-standard 151 pages, $28.50). Perplexed by rap language ("ay yo trip" = "check this out")? Befuddled by cyberspeak ("meatspace" = the physical world, as opposed to cyberspace)? All shall be made clear in this delightfully browseworthy compendium, in which we are given current slogans, quotes memorable and moronic, and learn that in the past 100 years, some 90,000 new words have come into the English language. There's even an amaze-your-friends "new word a year" chart that takes us from "gamma rays" in 1903 to "SARS" in 2003. Nirvana for lexophiles, and that's no small matter.
