'Schott’s Original Miscellany' by Ben Schott

$10.00

Sale

Sold Out

Shipping calculated at checkout.

Product variants

Quantity

book summary

Exactly what its title promises. And, the perfect bathroom book.

Inside, a small, beautifully over-organised cabinet of facts that are too specific for an encyclopaedia and too useful, strange or delightful to disappear. There's traditional measures, word pairings, sporting terms, etiquette, mnemonics, curious statistics, quotations, lists, symbols, scientific scales and just general smatterings of cultural debris you might hear in a pub discussion, or argument.

Schott treats apparently trivial information with the gravity of archival material, arranging it into compact typographic tableaux rather than explanatory essays. It is extraordinarily browsable; you open it to check one thing and emerge twenty minutes later knowing the Glasgow Coma Scale, traditional alcohol measures and several obsolete nautical terms. A dangerous little object for anyone susceptible to footnotes.

Bloomsbury, New York, 2003. First US edition. Hardcover. Light shelf wear and minor marks to boards; small spot to front cover. Internally clean and unmarked; binding firm. Very good condition.