The Wall Street Journal, December 9, 2005

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Publishers' Trivial Pursuits
By Robert J. Hughes

Mike Guffey has been boning up lately on medical disorders such as beriberi, a vitamin B1 deficiency. But not because he's a doctor or a nutritionist.

Mr. Guffey, 41, is a banker in Overland Park, Kan. -- and a trivia buff.

His latest purchase: “Assorted Trifles,” a new compendium of information ranging from which movie actors have been knighted to the technical term for fear of blushing (erythrophobia). “I found out a lot of things you didn't know could be wrong with you,” Mr. Guffey says.

This holiday season, many of the big questions on readers' minds actually will be… small. Several major publishers are betting on short attention spans -- and the desire of buyers to sound erudite at holiday cocktail parties -- and are releasing at least a dozen new books of trivia. Two new ones include “Odds'R: The Odds on Everything Book,” a Q-and-A book of odds on various subjects (example: There is a 1-in-3 chance of someone getting away with murder) and “Where?” a compendium of locations and addresses (the Partridge Family, 698 Sycamore Road, San Pueblo, Calif.). One of the biggest marketing pushes is for a new edition of the 1977 bestseller “The Book of Lists,” with tidbits that include Desi Arnaz's pre-bandleader profession -- a birdcage cleaner. Simba Information, a publishing-research group that calls the category “curiosities and wonders,” says the number of trivia books has jumped 41% in two years.

Barnes & Noble's merchandising director, Mike Ferrari, says the volume of trivia books is overwhelming this holiday season. “I have more than I can handle,” he says. That kind of competition has pushed some writers into semantic gymnastics to set their books apart from the pack. Among their new euphemisms: “significa” and “information art.” Other writers have to struggle with what constitutes something insignificant enough not to be worth wide knowledge but sufficiently interesting to make it into a book.

And then there's the whole issue of which of these new trivia books will become quickly forgotten items themselves.

However you define it (Webster's II: “insignificant or superfluous matters”), trivia is turning into a sizable business for the $28.5 billion book industry. In fact, here's a trivia question: After the Bible, what is the best-selling book of all time? According to “Bibliotopia,” a trivia book, it's another trivia book: “Guinness Book of World Records,” which has sold 95 million copies. With overall book sales down 2% this year, many publishers see collections of facts as a new way to reach buyers who don't want to read a full-length work. While no one tracks the dollar sales of trivia books per se, a few recent big hits like “Oxymoronica” (100,000 copies) are catching publishers' attention.

Trivial Matters

Find reading a trivia book too taxing? Here are some new trivia games for the holiday season.The advantage from a production standpoint is that many of these books are undersized, measuring 4½ inches by 7 inches, versus the 6 inches by 8½ inches of full-size books. That means they not only cost less to produce but also are cheaper to ship and store. A black-and-white trivia book might cost about 80 cents a copy to produce, for example, while a standard novel may run two or three times that much. Publishers also save on research costs, which are typically borne by the author; for more traditional nonfiction books, publishers sometimes foot research costs or build them into higher advances.

War and Pez

HarperCollins just came out with “Mental Floss Presents Forbidden Knowledge,” a compendium of historical facts organized around the seven deadly sins. It also just released “Mental Floss Presents: Instant Knowledge,” a work just 3¼ inches by 4¾ inches and full of tidbits such as this: The first Pez dispensers were made to look like Zippo lighters for adults trying to quit smoking. There's also “The Greatest Stories Never Told,” with a historical focus. “Busy people are interested in learning, interested in being intellectual, but don't have the time to do that hard work that that requires,” says Greg Chaput, an editor at HarperCollins.

Trivia books, of course, have been around since almanacs began tucking trivial material into single chapters. In the late 1970s, the industry got a boost with the release of “The Book of Lists” by Irving Wallace, David Wallechinsky and Amy Wallace, which provided rankings of categories like “Sexiest Men” (Burt Reynolds, among others) and has sold eight million copies in the interim. For the latest book, Mr. Wallechinsky and Ms. Wallace (Mr. Wallace has since died) were approached by publishers who wanted to reprint the original book of lists, but instead the writers ended up updating and adding some new ones. A typical list in the new edition is “Librarians Who Became Famous in Other Fields.” According to the authors, qualifiers include philosopher David Hume, Dada artist Marcel Duchamp, and Ambrogio Damiano Achille Ratti, who became Pope Pius XI in 1922.

But now, trivia is getting segmented and specialized, with entries such as “How to Survive a Robot Uprising,” about robots, and “Why Do Men Have Nipples?” which answers medical conundrums such as “Does Candle Flame Remove Earwax?” (Quick answer: No). Along similar lines is “The Hypochondriac's Pocket Guide to Horrible Diseases You Probably Already Have,” which explains ailments such as alien hand syndrome, in which one's hand tries to choke one to death. The author, Dennis DiClaudio, says he got the idea while researching infectious diseases for a medical publisher.

There's even a book on faux trivia, “The Areas of My Expertise,” by John Hodgman, which includes information for tracking werewolves, among other things. These days, it's all about “degrees of trivia,” says Sharon Bosley, reference-book buyer for Barnes & Noble; the chain says trivia titles are now a “substantial” part of its stores.

Man of Letters

The trivia groundswell is creating something of an identity crisis for authors who are trying to stand out in the pack. To carve out a niche, some are inventing special terms for their type of fact bites. Craig Conley, the author of “One Letter Words,” about letters, refers to his dictionary-like offering as “information art.” Mr. Wallechinsky of list-book fame says the proper way to refer to his entries is “significa.”

Even more challenging in some cases is when writers try to distinguish themselves from Ben Schott, the Brit who achieved literary fame writing about obscure topics. He's the industry's 800-pound gorilla, and is often the subject of potshots from rivals. “Let's just say that there was much about what was in [“Schott's Miscellany”] that I didn't find interesting, and rather common,” says “Assorted Trifles” author Stanley Newman. Adds Mitchell Symons, author of “That Book of Perfectly Useless Information,” “He will produce a list of the kings and queens of England. A list. That's interesting.”

Mr. Schott declines to respond, except to deny that his books qualify as trivia. “They are a miscellany of information on various things,” he says.

As to what publishers look for in a trivia book, it's often an I-know-it-when-I-see-it approach. Most say they try to identify material that will educate and entertain readers -- without taxing gray matter. David Roth-Ey, the editorial director at Harper paperbacks, looks for material that will draw in “bathroom readers.” These aren't the “kind of books people are going to ask the bookstore salesperson, 'Where is that book?' “ Mr. Roth-Ey says. “But, boy, when you put it out, they snap it up.”

Copyright © 2005 The Wall Street Journal