venta

The great thing about having (a) friends scattered across the country and (b) a deep distrust of the post office is that you get to go on giving and receiving Christmas presents well into January.

Yesterday I was given a copy of Schott's Original Miscellany.
It's a book of useless information.

Actually, no, it's a book of useful, but extremely random and varied, information.

The kind of book you can allow to fall open and find...well, let's demonstrate:

<opens book at random>

The names of the degrees of Freemasonry, the names of the seven dwarves, a list of test match special nicknames, roman numerals, the names of the apostles, and a list of -ocracies to describe different government systems.

I'm determined not to read it all the way through, but to keep opening it at different pages and seeing what I find. Gems so far have been a description of the 18th century Hat Tax, a list of peculiar deaths of Burmese monarchs, a description of rhetorical techniques with Churchillian examples, classification of icebergs, the menu for the last meal on the Titanic...

And it includes a spec of itself (paper type, type faces used, number of mentions of the word ptarmigan...).