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.