The Joy of (Outdated) Facts
By GEOFF NICHOLSON
The other day I realized I absolutely had to own a copy of the recently published facsimile of the first Guinness Book of Records from 1955 (limited edition of 5,000, mine is No. 177). It’s a fine book, and it gave me just want I wanted. Since I bought it, I’ve been regaling people with stories of Jacko, a dog owned by one Mr. J. Shaw of London that killed 1,000 rats in an hour and 40 minutes in May 1862; Mrs. Theresa Vaughan of Sheffield, who had had 61 bigamous marriages by the age of 24; and Dionsio Sanchez of Spain, who once drank 40 pints of wine in 59 minutes. It was a different world.
A world in which, if the book’s preface is to be believed, men went into bars and argued about facts. Dreamed up by Sir Hugh Beaver, the chairman of the Guinness Brewery, the Guinness Book of Records was to be kept behind the bar and pulled out to settle disputes, like, apparently, those over how many entrechats Nijinsky could perform in a single elevation. (Ten, since you ask.)
It took a while for me to understand why my need for the book had been so great, and then I realized, with a bit of a slap to the head, that for much of my life I’ve been accumulating “books of facts,” single volumes as well as multivolume sets. I also have eight random volumes of the 1969 World Book Encyclopedia, which I found on the street. Since I have the L volume, I can give you an idea of how the World Book editors thought things stood in London, Los Angeles and Luxembourg at that time, and what the prospects were for the lumber industry and for children’s literature: Miriam Gurko’s “Restless Spirit: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay,” for example, comes highly recommended for “older boys and girls.” But don’t ask me about anything from D to K.
As for why I’ve acquired these books, no doubt childhood trauma comes into it. While I grew up in an unbookish household, we did own (and I still have) a copy of “Everybody’s Pocket Companion: A Handy Reference Book of Astronomical, Biblical, Chemical, Geographical, Geometrical, Historical, Mathematical, Physical, Remedial, and Scientific Facts, Dates Worth Knowing, World Sports and Speeds Records, Mythological, Physiological, Monetary, Postal and General Information.” It’s undated but seems to be from the early 1950s. Within its small pages, you could learn the capitals of all the French colonies, “various trigonometrical formulae,” and how to remove a wet ink stain. (Steep it in milk.)
Most of us, I suppose, like to think we have a good general knowledge. But knowledge is rarely “general” at all. It’s usually extremely specific. As an Englishman who’s been in the United States for well over a decade, I still find many of the questions on “Jeopardy!” distinctly parochial. You may know what American city has Chocolate Avenue running through it (Hershey, Pa.). But why would I? An American watching English quiz shows would feel equally adrift.
Similarly, books of facts always display localized preferences, cultural values, sometimes straightforward prejudices. My “New American Cyclopaedia” (1872) tells me that in 1855 there were 25,858 people in New York who could neither read nor write, and 21,378 of them were Irish. This may well have been true, but why exactly did it need to be emphasized? Well, I think we might hazard a guess.
With hindsight, we can always see through the dubious “authority” of such historical sources. Few things look as unstable as the rock-solid certainties of previous ages. Since encyclopedias are supposed to be balanced and disinterested, the bias often seems even more naked. Sometimes I wonder if the editors of my 1952 Encyclopaedia Britannica ever regretted their assessment of William Faulkner: “It is naturalism run to seed, for it means nothing. . . . In the hands of Faulkner brute fact leads to little but folly and despair.” Certainly the current editors of the Britannica reckoned some serious updating was required. In the online edition, we now read, “Some critics . . . have found his work extravagantly rhetorical and unduly violent, and there have been strong objections, especially late in the 20th century, to the perceived insensitivity of his portrayals of women and black Americans.” Note, however, that instead of a lofty judgment, we’re now given the opinion of these shadowy “some critics.”
The preface to the 1952 Britannica says “experience indicates” that 75 percent of its material needs updating “only at long intervals” while the other 25 percent “requires constant revision.” Now there are online changes every day, with markers in the database to denote the comparative “volatility” of the entries, the executive editor, Michael Levy, told me.
However, changes are evidently still not to be undertaken lightly. According to the “article history,” the entry for Faulkner has been amended just four times since 2006, three of them the addition of Web site links. Wikipedia, where anyone can make changes, has a much more freewheeling attitude: 30 revisions for Faulkner in April 2010 alone, although some of them, of course, are simply undoing other people’s revisions.
Keen scholars can use these histories to track how our knowledge about the world and everything in it changes over time, but the rest of us use Wikipedia and similar repositories of facts mainly as a quick and very blunt research tool. This has its pitfalls. A school librarian friend who teaches research skills tells me (with despair) that her greatest struggle is getting students to do more than tap into Google. The corollary is that kids have also told her with complete confidence that the moon landings were fake and that 9/11 was an inside job. Their proof: It says so online.
It’s sometimes tempting to see the Internet as a free-for-all where facts, conspiracy theories and downright lies are created equal, but hierarchies of one kind or another still operate. The last time I looked, a Google search yielded about 350,000 results for Edna St. Vincent Millay and 1.5 million for William Faulkner — pretty good numbers, until you see that Lady Gaga gets over 70 million. The name Dionsio Sanchez (probably a misprint of the suspiciously appropriate Dionisio) yields just 9 results, not all of them for the record-breaking wine drinker. As a matter of fact, Sanchez no longer appears in Guinness World Records either. As the current editor in chief, Craig Glenday, has said: “We’re not going to encourage that sort of thing today. That’s how people get hurt.”
Of course, ideas of what’s worth knowing, and even what’s interesting, are constantly changing: The fascination with trigonometrical formulas certainly seems to have receded. But in a world where ever fewer people care about, or even understand the nature of, fiction, where readers and viewers demand facts and reality, outdated books of supposedly impartial information can be a useful reminder of just how slippery facts are — as unreliable as the most unreliable narrator.
Douglas Adams once told me that shortly before he wrote “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” he was working on a screenplay with the premise that all human civilization had been obliterated, except for a single copy of the Guinness book. Aliens from another planet tried to use it to reconstruct what life on Earth had been like: people sitting atop poles for 152 days at a time, eating 77 hamburgers at a sitting, talking nonstop for 127 hours.
The movie was never made, which I think was a great shame. The poster could have been emblazoned with the words “based on a true story.” All the facts were right there in the book, and you can’t argue with facts, can you?
The New York Times - May 20, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/books/review/Nicholson-t.html?nl=books&emc=booksupdateemb3&pagewanted=print
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