Something on Jerry Kindall's site reminded me of something that made me the fountain of useless understanding I am today. In 1975, author Irving Wallace and son David (who had not changed their names from the traditional family "Wallechinsky") decided to make a non-traditional almanac, one you could read for pleasure.

From the introduction:

We feel that adults, inundated and manipulated by special-intrest propaganda and government doubletalk in the guise of facts, are desperately searching for the truth and honesty in the information given them. We feel that young people are eager to elarn about things that are relevant to their lives. We feel that most people suspect that there is more to a fact than meets the eye, and when posible we want to turn each fact around and show the world its backside. ... This is a reference book to be read for pleasure. This is an informative book that is meant to provide entertainment. This is a book in which to look up facts and also have fun. ... We have thought it more important to know ten times more about ten artists or athletes than to know next to nothing about 100 of them. ... We have deliberately chosen depth over breadth. We haev purposely omitted retail figures on businses, population of states, corn yields, list of fraternities, common-stock dividends, hydroelectric plants, and similar data, in order to make room for a guide to existing Shangri-las where people live to the age of 100 or more, a revealing rundown of some last wills of celebrated personages, survival kits for those who live in the city or visit the wilderness, a gallery of fascinating footnote people who have been overlooked by history books.

1500 pages, including index, and before high school I'd read every page, most many times. It was where I learned about alternatives to the Mercator projection, proposed calendar systems of more "equity," a history of the US including such details as murders by slaves, death masks, great inventions, Paul Robeson, Parson Weems, and so much more. One chapter of lists was so popular that it became a separate book, The Book of Lists. It, like the Almanac, was a best-seller.

Three years later, Irving and David released a newer, better, even bigger book, The People's Almanac #2, with absolutely no repeated material, and amazing feat from which I learned even more. There was a The Book of Lists #2 as well, also a best seller, but then it started petering out simply due to lack of uncovered material. The People's Almanac Presents the Book of Lists/the '90s Edition), but it never hit on quite the same way the versions 15 years earlier had. These books started so much more than the now-familiar book of assembled lists: they provided depth for those of us who wanted more than sound bites, even back then. I knew that the Hundred Years War lasted 117 years, and a lot more, and it made me extremely unpopular with people who preferred a simplistic view of the world (namely, most of my peers and most of my teachers, with a few exceptions).

There's still one Almanac book in print: The People's Almanac Presents The Twentieth Century: History With the Boring Parts Left Out, printed in October 1999. It's by David Wallechinsky. It looks like this:

I'm ordering it this week, and if you never read any of the earlier books, you should too. (These links give me a kickback if you order directly from Amazon, but I'm willing to live with that.)