Books do furnish a room, and quirky books for Christmas do furnish an enormous warehouse somewhere within easy reach of the M25. There are more of them than ever this year, some purportedly comic, some wilfully trivial, a few of them uncategorisable in their oddness, but all of them have one thing in common: they will be outsold by the Hairy Bikers’ diet book. Anyone who tells you that the world is a just and fair place has never written a quirky book for Christmas.
In the still popular trivia category — which has survived the stark retraction of the Ben Schott empire — two books stand out. The Unbelievable Truth (Preface, £16.99, Spectator Bookshop, £13.99) is a spin-off from the Radio 4 panel show, where hard-to-believe facts vie with easy-to-believe lies. The book, however, concentrates on the facts, and they are a splendid crop.
Look up L for Lemons, and we have the following. Rubbing a lemon under your arms is a traditional Puerto Rican treatment for a hangover. Casanova gave his mistresses partially squeezed lemon halves to use as contraceptives. And at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, when the outnumbered Ottoman fleet ran out of missiles, they threw lemons and oranges at the Holy League soldiers, who in turn threw them back. Graeme Garden, he of The Goodies, and Jon Naismith compile the show and wrote the book, but needless to say the only person mentioned or shown on the cover is the show’s host David Mitchell, whose only contribution here is a brief introduction. Ah, the power of celebrity.
No less inventive is Numberland: The World In Numbers (O’Mara, £12.99, Spectator Bookshop, £10.99) by Mitchell Symons, the doyen of all things trivial.
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