The Just the Facts, Please, Almanac

June 19, 2008— -- Ever wonder who's the most influential non-existent man in history? Well, Marlboro Man narrowly defeated Santa Claus and Sherlock Holmes to claim that title.

What about the number of hotel rooms in the United States? (There are more than 4 million.)

This is not trivia, according to Ben Schott, this is "significa": Random information that Schott inhales daily. Such as the number of Americans who died in recreational boating accidents in 2006 (a total of 697).

"It's sort of walking with a purpose through information. You're looking at everything from news, magazines, listen to the radio, visiting museums, and just see what catches your eye," said Schott, sitting at a busy desk in his London apartment.

While the 24-hour news channels spew the immediate headline, Schott digests all he can and once a year regurgitates his take on the past 12 months.

"What I'm trying to do is filter information that I think is interesting and put it into an almanac," Schott told me. "If you wrote an almanac, or anyone else wrote an almanac, it would have very different information."

In his 2006-07 edition, Schott includes significant events like political rumblings in Pakistan, which generates three and a half lines of copy. Donald Rumsfeld's resignation gets a line. Paris Hilton's jail time gets six lines. And he adds whatever else tickles his fancy.

"I love secret knowledge. I love taxonomy. I love the idea that there's a vocabulary that people in a field know, that they take for granted, and other people don't," he said.

For example, he shares the sign language the New York oil traders use on the floor. No one outside the industry needs to know it, but as Schott enthusiastically described it I couldn't help but smile.

That's why his books sell: two million and counting. People really do want to know that Marlon Brando once patented a drum tension adjuster.

"Hypnosis shows that we take in far more than we can actively comprehend," Schott told me as we wandered around one his favorite haunts, Sir John Soane's Museum in London. Schott is a very English figure: Good tailoring, floppy hair, a reincarnation of a 19th century aesthete, perhaps. "I mean, it would be a torture if we recalled everything and a torture if we recalled nothing," he opines. "So somehow there's a balance of normality."