Critical Mick

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A Book About A Thousand Things
George Stimpson
Harper & Brothers, 1946

How is "ye" pronounced in "ye good old days"?

Time for a tribute to a second-hand book that has been on the Critical Mick bookshelf for the last dozen years or more. Published in 1946 and available at garage sale near you, George Stimpson's A Book About A Thousand Things is a magnificent compendium to inherit from the elder generation's collection to your own.

This is the ultimate bathroom book. With short, engaging articles encompassing fields historical, grammatical, scientific, etymological, and anthropological, this truly is A Book About A Thousand Things. Think Schott's Original Miscellany as told by that radio codger that says "...and now you know, The Rest of the Story."

The beauty is that Stimpson's book is so random. Erudite topics follow one another without any conceivable order. "Who was the inspired idiot?" follows "How much is a sou?", and then comes "How is 'gums' pronounced?" It's not just in 2006 that the world is an absurd, bizarre, beautiful, horrific, complicated place. A Book About A Thousand Things reveals that it was that way, too, sixty years ago- and yet civilization has somehow survived.

To illustrate: here are the titles of a few of the articles:

And, it's all so forgettable. A Book About A Thousand Things is one to keep on the bookshelf and re-discover every few years. Subjects like "How did a spider save Scotland?" or "Is it unlawful to write a check for less than a dollar?" or "What is the Trench of Bayonets?" feel familiar as grade school chums. Stimpson's elaborations always feel like a friendship reacquainting.

And no page ends at the conclusion of an article. There is no point in the book when a reader feels they have reached a natural resting point. For sake of completion the pages turn, and then there is just one more short interesting entry, and then there is the beginning of another. No matter where a reader dips in, the pages just turn and turn and turn.

History is a big kick for me. Forget novels where the heroic action is set against the backdrop of this pivotal event or that. Accounts of actual events are where the best characters and stories can be found. A Book About A Thousand Things is, in its accidental way, a record of what phrases, beliefs and topics were in common usage for the men who fought the Second World War. There are articles to read, and lines to read between.

Selections in it are strikingly un-PC. It's interesting to see social matters of race, for instance, treated with the same dispassion as "Does the backbone of a camel curved upward in the middle?" or "Do flatirons get so they will not hold heat? "

This book helps to judge an age by its own standards and not the standards of a future day. Its illustration of attitudes helps to understand the how's and why's of subsequent history in a way that Stimpson's anecdotes about Robert the Bruce don't.

One potentially interesting fact. A Book About A Thousand Things contains several entries about World War I. Yet, written during WWII, there is only one passing reference to Hitler. There's a mention that during the war, squeaking shoes became fashionable in England. That's it. The erudite Stimpson, with all his knowledge, must not have known what the hell to make of that Armageddon that had just killed forty million people. Life truly must be lived forward, but only understood (and turned into trivia) in reverse.

Let me add from my Dublin home one more interesting, random titbit as postscript.

Stimpson, like Critical Mick, was born an Iowa boy. He is imagined as a man strong in the Midwestern values described by Jonathan Franzen in The Corrections. A journalist and highly regarded expert on many subjects, Stimpson wrote ten books and had ambitions to write further tomes about politics and other topics. After years of poor health George Stimpson passed away in 1952. His papers are available for viewing at the University of Iowa. In his life, whatever else he did, he produced one book that unruly reviewer Mick Halpin declared "a treasure for future generations."

You never know what demands every day life will bring! Arm yourself with bizarre knowledge for a bizarre world.

Yo! This review and all content on the DFA Guide site are copyright 2006 Mick Halpin. All links to other sites and documents are copyright to whatever source wrote something cool enough for Mick to give it a referral. Try to claim them as your own work and bad karma will catch up with you, baby. Believe it.

Irate, huh? Managed to piss off another one? Direct your hatemail to mick @ mickhalpin dot com.

This Page Was Last Updated On 12 November, 2006.