After finishing “The Know It All” this morning, by A.J. Jacobs, I felt a small, shared, portion of his satisfaction at finally reading in it’s entirety, The Encyclopedia Britannica.
But let me back up a second.
Do you all remember seeing adverts for the Encyclopedia Britannica in crapazines like “The Reader’s Digest” way back? They were the ultimate reference books; they were always leather bound, always impenetrably thick and always left on people’s shelf gathering dust. I think that there was an edition that came with a small bag of genuine house dust (now with 100% dead human skin cells!) that you could sprinkle liberally on your tomes, so it looked like you’ve had them there for years.
But my point being is this: not many people had/have the EB on their shelves, and even fewer casually refer to them. So when I heard that a guy announced to all his friends that he was going to read the entire Britannica, all 33,000 pages of it, I was more than slightly intrigued.
The book is structured, chronologically, alphabetically and more than a little ironically, just like it’s inspiration. Rather than a dry journal about a pretty dry subject, he made it a letter by letter, volume by volume, fact upon fact filled journey that we take together. Remarkably, through this tidal wave of “fun facts”, “hilarity” actually “ensued”.
Jacobs is genuinely charming, self effacing, vulnerable and at all times, honest. And it’s a refreshingly self assured man that can make the funniest stories in the book about his own misfortune. And I do love it when people write about feelings that we think but don’t often say. Through years of envy about his dad’s achievements, through his many attempts to make his wife pregnant, and through many attempts to find out how to measure intelligence, Jacobs’ quest to be the ’smartest person in the world’ finds us with a man that just wants to improve his self worth, through the only means he knows how. Reading.
A thoroughly enjoyable book, written by a former Entertainment weekly staff writer and the current Esquire magazine editor, that takes a good look at the EB and stares it dead in the face.
So before I finish here are a few fun facts to take away:
Lightening travels upwards. There’s an initial strike, but the actual bolt of ‘light’ actually goes from the ground to the sky.
The opposite feeling to ‘deja vu’ (where you feel that situation that you’ve never been through is strangely familiar), is known as jamais vu, (where a familiar situation is now feels like it’s happening for the first time).
*Newly added by request, because three is so much better than two.
The Estrucans (a pre roman Italian civilization) wrote in boustrophedon style which meant that each line flowed from left to right then right to left, alternating from line to line, so the eye never travels needlessly across the page like an old type writer.
