The Visual Miscellaneum

One of the best perks of blogging here is all the free stuff people send me. Like, today, for instance, I opened my mail and found one of the more attractive books I've ever laid eyes on. It's by David McCandless and it's called The Visual Miscellaneum, a Colorful Guide to the World's Most Consequential Trivia. (Right up our alley, eh?) McCandless is a London-based writer and graphic designer who thinks the best way to absorb information is by mapping facts in colorful and cool/quirky ways. So you've got things here like a consensus cloud called Books Everyone Should Read (happy to see Catch-22 is the largest/darkest in the cloud), and a "Better Than Bacon" chart, which shows the faces of a series of actors who are way better connectors for the game SDoKB than Bacon himself.

In the spirit of the book, though, a picture is worth a thousand words. So here's a few examples I really loved.