For this first half of the interview I want to excerpt a few entries from the first half of the book:
"A sinister cabal of superior writers."
For this first half of the interview I want to excerpt a few entries from the first half of the book:
P.T. Barnum: 'When he was eighty-one, P.T. Barnum fell gravely ill. At his request, a New York newspaper printed his obituary in advance so that he might enjoy it. That’s brilliant. In fact, that could be a nice new revenue stream for newspapers – they could sell obits to people on their deathbeds. The encyclopedia is giving me lots of good ideas.'
Book: 'The United Nations defines a book as a text that is at least forty-nine pages long. By that definition, the Britannica equals 683 books. Unsettling.'
Braille, Louis: 'Just as unsettling: the number of prodigies in the Britannica. Braille developed his writing system for the blind at age fifteen. Bentham — the one who later had himself muffified — was studying Latin at the age of four. (When I was four, I was studying the effects of shoving bananas up my nose.) At age five, Aleksandr Blog was writing memorable Russian poetry. If I had known about these whiz kids back when I thought I was the smartest boy in the world, I wonder if I would have seen them as compadres, or if it would have snapped me out of my dream.’
Deseret News: I always thought the name of Utah’s major newspaper was some sort of weird misspelling of the word “desert.” But no, Deseret is the “land of the honeybee,” according to the Book of Mormon. I guess I should have figured they would have caught a typo in the masthead after 154 years.
Scott Butki: I want to start by going back before you wrote the book. You said in the book that for a brief time in your childhood you thought you were a know-it-all genius. Was that part of the genesis of this book idea?
A.J. Jacobs: Absolutely. When I was a kid, I was under the bizarre delusion that I was the smartest boy in the world. As I got older, I realized this, sadly, was not the case. Far from it. So Operation Britannica was a way to at least bump up my IQ a couple of points.
Your dad also tried to read the Encyclopedia Britannica but stopped. Was that one reason you wanted to do it?
Scott Butki was a newspaper reporter for more than 10 years before making a career change into education... then into special education.
He reads at least 50 books a year and has about the same number of author interviews each year and, …
Article comments
1 - Nik
Good interview - I really enjoyed Jacobs' book myself, and his gentle good humor really shines through in it. It's the kind of book that could seem unbearably smug and pretentious done wrong.
2 - Scott Butki
Thanks a lot.
The second part was published this morning here.