The Know It All

When I heard about this book, I just had to own it. I mean, really, people have been accusing me of being a "know-it-all" for decades--more than five decades, actually--and here's somebody who's stolen my thunder. He's read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica from A to Zed (33,000 pages and 44 million words) and then written a bestseller about the experience. I hate him, the show off!

I never dreamed up A.J. Jacobs's gimmick, darn it, but I came close. You see, when I was ten my parents bought my younger brother and me a set of The World Book Encyclopedia (10,518 pages and around 10 million words by my rough calculation). I'm not sure Paul used it much, but I was immediately enthralled. I kept it in my room. As a budding know-it-all, each night I would grab a volume at random from the shelf and read it in bed until I fell asleep. I even autographed the inside cover of each of the 19 volumes. I still sign my books, but not with the paraph I used then. (A paraph is the decorative flourish accompanying a signature; it was once a popular technique to deter forgery. Think of John Hancock's signature, for example.) 

I still have those World Books. The graphics are simple--quaint, one might say--and of course the information is outdated (for example, the entry for "computer" says: See Calculating Machine), but they are still fun to leaf through. And Jacob's book, modestly subtitled "One man's humble quest to become the smartest person in the world," is a hoot! It's part memoir, part education, and all fun. He writes with wit and charm, and he shares with the reader his journey of discovery from a-ak to zywiec and everything in between. I learned, for example, the following tidbits with which I can now astound my friends:

• besides being a writer, among other things Goethe was a lawyer, painter, theater manager, statesman, soldier, alchemist, astrologer, songwriter, philosopher, botanist, biologist, issuer of military uniforms, and mine inspector
• in some languages there is a cousin to the prefix and the suffix; it's called an "infix," and there's only one in English; it's not polite, but Red Sox fans use it as Bucky Dent's middle name
• Alaska is both the western-most and eastern-most U.S. state (check it out on a globe)
• a "square root" is so called because the Pythagoreans would make a square of, say, 16 pebbles with four equal rows; thus the bottom row--the root of that square--was four

I also learned about the Ebbinghaus curve (a.k.a. the "forgetting curve"). I'd tell you more, but I don't remember how it works.

One thing I didn't learn was why Britannica's last entry isn't zyzzyva, any of various tropical American weevils, often destructive to plants. I've always thought that would be a great Scrabble word, but there aren't enough Z-tiles to pull it off.