Fact freak Ben Schott writes the book on 2006

Ben Schott knows that the devil is in the details. In fact, just about everything is. In the Schott's Original Miscellany, Schott's Food & Drink Miscellany, and Schott's Sporting, Gaming & Idling Miscellany trilogy (Bloomsbury), he unearths all sorts of strange and telling minutiae that might win you a bar bet or get you popped in the nose for being a smartass.

Now, with the Schott's Almanac series, he brings his same jeweler's eye precision to the year's events. For the 2007 edition, Schott has chronicled everything from Al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to Barbaro, the Kentucky Derby-winning horse that broke its ankle at the Preakness, to the molecular structure of Tamiflu. It's a dense, strange, at times precious book that makes readers feel nostalgic for the very recent past and simultaneously immersed in the ongoing narrative of history as it's told in newspaper headlines, tabloids, and government statistics. Speaking with Radar via transatlantic telephone, Schott sounded more like a stammering but charming Hugh Grant character than a data-crunching savant. But his comments offer an interesting window into his densely packed mind and an even more chock-a-block news year.

I was always the student who found the footnote much more interesting than the main block of textRADAR: How do you describe what it is that you do?
BEN SCHOTT: Somebody called me an information architect, and I have to say that was very pleasing. One of the metaphors of what I do that I like is a sort of curator. Often it's a question of finding information that might've otherwise been undiscovered or neglected or not focused upon. What's fun—and I think this is one of the great joys of curating—is making juxtapositions.

Tell me a little bit about your process. How do you read the paper, what do you look for?
Some things are obvious; some things have to go in. Major news events happen and you just know you have to deal with them. So, for example: Israel-Hezbollah-Gaza. That's a significant aspect of the year's news. There's no doubt that has to go in. Once you know that, then you ask the questions: How do you do the research? How much space do you devote to it? What's the angle? What information? What kind of graphics do you need? How do you make it interesting? A non-partisan, yet not banal, list of facts? How do you give a texture to the events?—which is something I try very hard to do.

Everything is written so concisely. How do you decide what to throw out?
I tend to write it quite selfishly. I don't think you can write for a particular audience. I tend to look at any news story and say, Well, what do I need to know? Who are these people? Has this happened before? What's increasingly interesting about modern media is its filters: if you actually look at websites, technology from TiVo to iPods to blogs, it's all about filter. What we mean when we say we like a blog or we like a website is that we like somebody's filter. And we have several filters for different things. Of course our friends are filters. Word of mouth is the ultimate filter. So what I try to do is act as a personal filter. When I say personal, I don't mean political or partisan, I mean, What's the Schott's Almanac take on this? It's almost a sort of character.

How did that character come about? What kind of student were you? What kind of writer were you before this series came about?

I was never a writer. I read politics at Cambridge then went into advertising for three months and quit. And then I was a professional portrait photographer. The writing sort of happened by chance. I never trained as a writer, but selection interests me a tremendous amount. Selection is personal. I've always slightly questioned the idea that a reference book is authoritative and stands completely outside of the personalities that create it. The really great reference books—if you think of Roget's Thesaurus, if you think of Johnson's Dictionary—some of the greatest reference books are actually one person selecting.

Were you always drawn to minutiae? Did you always seek the telling little details?
Absolutely. I was always the student who found the footnote much more interesting than the main block of text. I've never been drawn to trivia in the sense of quizzes or competitions. Partly because I have a terrible memory for these things.

It's astonishing if you start counting the number of times Angelina Jolie has been on the cover 'Us Weekly.' But to have an Almanac that didn't talk about this would be preposterous. You can't just have the highbrow. The lowbrow is part of lifeThat's surprising considering all the strange little stories and forgotten scandals you have in the book.
It's written in real-time. It's not like I sat down in September and said, Right, now what's this year been?

As we start the new year, are you getting nervous, like you have to start all over again?
I'm writing it as we speak. I'm looking at polonium in England. I want to write something about the Islamic veil that is increasingly a political subject in Europe. Not necessarily so much in America, but watch this space. If you look back at 2005, it was almost a traditional news year. It was the death of the Pope, it was the tsunami and the aftermath, it was Hurricane Katrina, the 7/7 bombs in London, the G8 Conference, the Olympics. Old fashioned news: beginning, middle, and end.

This year it has been very interesting, very thematic. Rather than events, it's been ideologies, I think. If you look at the Danish cartoon crisis, the analysis I did of that, which I thought really summed up the year, was twofold. First of all, this notion of a sort of political chaos theory: That very small events locally can [create] very rapid events globally. There's nothing new in that: Archduke Ferdinand's assassination prompted World War I. But it took a long time. Things happen almost instantly now. The publication of cartoons in one country led to rioting across the Muslim world. The other facet behind that is the clash of rights and faiths. So the so-called Western liberal right of free speech compared to the right of religious respect.

Why not put all this stuff on a website with links out to government sites and other sources? Why lock these facts into the most old-fashioned medium possible? Are you being willfully antiquated?
No, it's not willful at all. First of all, I love books. When you can lend a website to a friend, when you can take it on holiday, when you can fold it up and put in your pocket, when you can scribble marginalia, when you can get suntan lotion and sand all over its pages, when you can admire it as an object, when you can hurl a website across the room in disgust, then maybe I'll be fully convinced.

I'm sure someone's working on that right now.
I'm sure they are. But this book probably wouldn't really be possible without the Internet because I use the Internet a lot. Now, when I say that, I don't mean I go surf Google or Wikipedia and just take what I get. In many ways, the Internet is just a faster cab to the library.

Let's talk about the breakdown you did of covers of Us Weekly.

There's the comparison of Us Weekly and People magazines.

It's so numbing to see that stuff all together.
It's astonishing. You realize what a very small and shallow pool of celebrity in which one swims.

Shallow in every sense.
Exactly. And it's astonishing if you start counting the number of times Angelina Jolie has been on the cover—you begin to see that it's a tiny little cast. But to have an Almanac that didn't talk about this would be preposterous. Whether we like it or not, or whether we try to live in the pages of the New York Review of Books, you can't just have the highbrow. The lowbrow is part of life.

Is part of your mission to make sense of the year and reconcile all of these things?
I think a pattern emerges for me, but someone else might read it and get a completely different pattern. I think the year is a sort of grand Rorschach, because you can look at the same data and see very different things. It's very easy to make really clumsy juxtapositions of data and to play to one particular facet of the readership. I really try, I make it a tremendous ambition to be nonpartisan but yet still be sort of interesting and entertaining.

Often it's a question of finding information that might've otherwise been undiscovered or neglected or not focused uponDo you think you have a job for life now?
I hope so.

Is it exhausting?
It is exhausting. What's interesting is that you get better at it. I remember I was in New York at the beginning of the year with the Dubai ports thing/scandal/
crisis/question, and it was odd. I was there talking to people and reading papers and just getting a sense, and everyone said, "This is gonna be a huge deal. This is a mess. This speaks to executive power, it speaks about race relations, it speaks about homeland security." And I just thought, You know what, it's nonsense. It will be in the book because it did say some quite interesting things about some facets of American society.

But what's odd is, having done this for a few years, and you look at the news cycle and you just think, Yeah, here we go. This story only exists because it has to exist because of the last story. You could almost plot it—like Martha Stewart's recent troubles. There's a musical notation, and the melody has an inevitable forward movement to it. So, like a chord sequence, to sound pleasing it has to go into a certain direction. I suppose there is a narrative of news and I do think it's different in different countries, but once you get into the sense of it, you can't predict the future, but when you see the next bit of news it always makes sense. You go, But of course. Martha came out and there had to be redemption—that's the American story. It was sort of inevitable.

Do you have any desire to write in longer form or do something more narrative?
I've done some, but I will never write a novel. I can make that a firm guarantee. Seriously, I have no skill in fiction whatsoever. You only have to meet a good novelist to think, This is why I don't write novels. At the moment I'm very interested in the marriage of writing and graphics simultaneously. I think when it's done well, it changes the way I think. And there is a real sense that the way you present data does change the way you perceive data. There's no reason it has to be simple. People aren't stupid. People have the ability to take in so much more information than anyone ever thinks, if it's presented in a way that is accessible and pleasing. I think you can be entertaining, and you can be wry, and amusing and informative. You can steer a course between glib and stuffy and pompous. That's what I want to do. I'm very aware of snark and tried not to [include it] because it's so easy. And actually, you don't need it.

And that's not what's going to last. The information is what's going to last.

Exactly. I think it's easier to be snarky than it is to be decent. Anything to get a smile. It doesn't last. And actually, it does date.

Are you a very particular, detail-oriented person outside of your writing?
A bit [laughs]. I aspire to be a neat freak but it doesn't ever happen. It's the difference between the artist's studio and the gallery. The books are like the gallery—everything hung, and everything's got a place and an order and a space and a label. It tries to be as neat as possible. But the artist's studio is always filled with drunk cups of coffee and paintbrushes and general detritus. And I'm much more like that.

What will it take to get you to fully accomplish the neat freak thing?
Oh, an entirely different personality.