‘THE COMPENDIUM OF (NOT QUOTE) EVERYTHING’
Jonn Elledge (Headline).
Many books have mentioned the fact BackRub was one the earliest names of Google. Many books have mentioned that there was a war between 1272 and 1278 that killed 15,000 people. It started when a Belgian peasant stole a cow. But I’ll bet this is the first book ever to mention both those facts.
Jonn Elledge’s self-professed aim with this compendium is to ‘provoke the enjoyable feeling of getting lost in an online encyclopedia, sinking deeper into a warm bath of trivia’. The book covers simply what interests him, for no other reason than that’s what interests him.
Jonn Elledge gives us the feeling of getting lost in a web encyclopedia. Pictured: Gordon Kaye and Vicki Michelle in ‘Allo ‘Allo
In the section on measurements he reveals that ‘myriad’ — these days a general word meaning ‘a lot’ — was, to the ancient Greeks, a specific word for 10,000. In the section on countries we learn that only about 13 of the world’s 150 or so non-European countries entirely escaped colonisation by a European one. In the section on food, we find the loganberry. This is a cross between blackberry and raspberry. It was accidentally planted by Logan, an American man.
Some of the facts are quite amazing. If the 13.8 billion year history of the universe is converted to a single year, for instance, the dinosaurs don’t become extinct until 6am on December 30. And Jesus Christ doesn’t exist until five seconds before midnight on New Year’s Eve.
Genghis Khan killed an estimated 11 per cent of the world’s population. The Australian army could have gotten along with him in 1932 when they were sent to kill some emus that were destroying crops. Despite the fact they were using machine guns, the soldiers couldn’t cope with the birds’ incredible speed, or ability to run in zig-zags, so after a few days they admitted defeat and left.
Other facts are memorable for their absurdity. The TV programme ‘Allo ‘Allo ran from 1982 to 1992, meaning it lasted more than twice as long as the real-life Nazi occupation of France.
Then there are the beautiful facts, the ones which prove that the supposedly dull world of (adopts nasal librarian monotone) ‘facts and figures’ can have a poetry all of its own. The point on Earth that is furthest from dry land (it’s in the South Pacific, 1,670 miles from the Pitcairn Islands, Easter Island and Antarctica) is known as Point Nemo, Latin for ‘no one’.
The Beaufort wind power scale is like a poem. Force three includes ‘leaves and small twigs in constant motion’, six means ‘umbrellas used with difficulty’, while force 12 is simply ‘devastation’.
Jonn Elledge (Headline), “THE COMPENDIUM of (NOT QOTE) EVERYTHING”
This wouldn’t be a bad book to give to a child who’s about to start secondary school. They will find some of the facts useful, and it will also make them question what constitutes a fact.
Elledge is very good at reminding us that supposedly hard-and-fast information — the sort that gets quoted in textbooks, and indeed news reports — is often far less certain than we think.
Even something as ‘simple’ as the world’s longest river. You’ll usually see the answer ‘the Nile’, with a figure anywhere between 4,130 and 4,404 miles. This discrepancy demonstrates that measuring the length of a river can be difficult. Which of its many sources should you choose?
At the other end, it isn’t always clear where a river stops and the sea starts. Do you measure the left, right or middle bank? These and other factors can influence the answer. Some people claim that the world’s longest river is actually the Amazon.
What counts as ‘interesting’ is a very personal matter. So I’d be amazed if you were interested in everything in this book. But then I’d be amazed if you were interested in nothing in this book. You’ll certainly learn something.
For instance, I really thought I knew my Michael Caine — but somehow I’d missed the fact that in 2016 the actor (famously born Maurice Micklewhite) had finally changed his name by deed poll. It was to make life easier at airports.
‘A security guard would say “Hi Michael Caine”, and suddenly I’d give him a passport with a different name on it. I could stand there for an hour.’