Towering Trivia

By Paul Gray

THE PEOPLE'S ALMANAC

by DAVID WALLECHINSKY and

IRVING WALLACE 1,478 pages. Doubleday. $7.95.

Novelist Irving Wallace and his son David Wallechinsky* justify this massive expenditure of paper and ink with forthright immodesty: "Where the familiar, standard almanacs leave off and stop--well, that's where The People's Almanac begins." They are incontestably correct. Among the items not to be found in standard almanacs but present here: summaries of every game played in the Little League World Series; a biography of Scrooge McDuck, Donald Duck's miserly uncle; pop psychohistories of selected U.S. Presidents, including Truman ("Harry was a 'mama's boy' "); 16 pages of fact and gossip about the Academy Awards; Eartha Kitt's idea of utopia and a summary of W.C. Fields' will, which left his mistress $25,000, two bottles of perfume, a Cadillac and a dictionary.

Seekers of such argument settlers as the population of American cities or the gross national product will not find them in The People's Almanac. But the book is a trove for trivia freaks who wake in the middle of the night with a craving to list "15 renowned redheads" (e.g., Thomas Jefferson, Lucille Ball) or the "nine breeds of dog that bite the most" (among them: German shepherd, chowchow, poodle) or the site of the annual watermelon seed-spitting contest (Paul's Valley, Okla.). Those addicted to the filler material at the bottom of newspaper columns will find an attic's worth of yellowing snippets ("If you had spent $1,000 a day every day since Christ was born, you would not have spent $1 billion").

Containing over 1 million words, 250,000 words more than in the Bible, the book is both massively silly and regularly entertaining. With its jumbling of serendipitous facts and legends, crackpot theories, gossip and lunacies through the ages, The People's Almanac resembles nothing so much as an inspired collaboration between Benjamin Franklin and Rona Barrett. Paul Gray

* Who resumed the original family name, changed when Wallace's immigrant father arrived at Ellis Island.

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