The Book of Lists: The Original Compendium of Curious Information

Introduction As Oscar Wilde observed, the only sin is to be bored. We believe it is an equal sin to be boring, and if the great wit was correct, then the authors and millions ofBook of Listsreaders are quite unblemished by sin: for we place a high value on curiosity. The original 1977 volume ofThe Book of Lists, and its all-new sequels, inspired nearly 200 imitation volumes. These have included books of lists about movies, rock 'n' roll, Judaism, the Bible, general sports, and countless other subjects. The books spawned games, toilet paper with lists on it, CD-ROMs, calendars and television shows. We had no idea thatThe Book of Listswould become a bestseller, let alone a phenomenon. We thought we were just having fun. The Book of Listsrose to number 1 on the bestseller lists, and was published all over the world. Young readers wrote to tell us they'd bought our book for fun, and were using it to spice up their schoolwork. Older readers locked themselves in bathrooms, curled up in bed, took the book to parties and demanded more editions. We invited their contributions, which came pouring in, and we featured many of them in the editions that followed. Although we are pleased to have popularised a genre that so many people enjoy, we do not pretend to have been its founders. That honour goes to the Reverend Nathaniel Wanley, author ofWonders of the Little World, a book of lists first published in 1678. We didn't know about the Reverend Wanley when we wrote our own Book of Lists, but a glance through his table of contents shows striking similarities: "Of such People and Nations as have been scourged and afflicted by small and contemptible things," "Of such as having been extremely Wild, and Prodigal, or Debauched in their Youth, have afterwards proved excellent Persons," "Of such as have been seized with an extraordinary joy, at what hath followed there-upon." The trend never died down, and in recent years has had a dazzling renaissance. We appear to live in an age in which the volume of information available to us is far too overwhelming for our minds to process. The everyday lists we all make are a balm to a cluttered mind; list-making puts things in order, it clarifies, it helps coax truth from the cracks of the universe, and it invites our favourite question: "What if . . . ?" In the present volume, we have updated our readers' favourite lists, prepared an array of new material, and included lists from a wide variety of notables and celebrities. We owe much of the inspiration for this volume to our father, Irving Wallace, who always hoped we'd continue to compile new editions. Whenever possible, we have concentrated on lists that cause readers to laugh out loud, gasp, shake their heads in wonder, or call out "Wait until you hear this!" To quote Mark Twain's introduction toThe Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: "Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot." INTRODUCTION AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS FROM IRA BASEN AND JANE FARROW It was hard not to feel intimidated about joining forces with the Wallace and Wallechinsky list machine. The firstBook of Lists,by David, Amy and their father, Irving, was brilliant. David and Amy have subsequently spent several decades filing away obscure pieces of information to be included in future books of lists. And here we were, two CBC radio producers, whose brains gear more towards finding interesting people to talk to on the radio than to trying to find a Canadian who had died laughing. Sometimes we got lucky. We hadn't really expected to be abWallechinsky, David is the author of 'The Book of Lists: The Original Compendium of Curious Information', published 2006 under ISBN 9780770430092 and ISBN 0770430090.