Twenty-five years ago, I was a scrawny, short, flat-footed child with an irrepressible competitive streak. Sports, obviously, were out of the question. But fortunately for me, my school had a program called Academic Games. We’d play six competitive games against other schools on the local, state, and national levels—testing our knowledge of mathematics, logic, language, history, rhetoric, and current events.
As a writer who presumes to comment on what is happening in the world today, I’m embarrassed to admit that “World Card” (the current events game) was hardly my best. But I think it was entrapment: To prepare for that game, we were issued copies of The World Almanac, a thousand-page trove of all manner of information. Tasked with reading up on what happened over the past 12 months, my 13-year-old self would, instead, wander aimlessly through the amazing pages of this tome, which seemed to have an answer for any question that popped into my head. When Game Day finally arrived, I was ready to tell you the circumference of the moon but had forgotten who had the top-selling pop single of 1992.
Alas, useful books such as these seem to be going the way of the dinosaurs, replaced by the Internet. The Encyclopaedia Britannica is digital only; the World Book Encyclopedia is still available, but nobody will be coming to your door to try to sell it to you. For a while, it seemed as though the Internet age would even destroy The Almanac of American Politics, although thankfully it found a new print home. So imagine my surprise when I discovered that The World Almanac is still in print, and still as great as ever. This 2017 edition is an impressive 1,008 pages long, chockfull of all manner of facts, figures, and dates.
Need to know what the Thirty Years’ War was? Turn to page 171: “1618-1648. A series of religious and political conflicts involving most countries of Western Europe.” Curious how much tuition costs at Emory University? Page 424 has the answer: It’s $47,954 per year (room and board cost an extra $13,486). How about the largest land vehicular tunnel in the United States? Page 725 tells us about the Anton Anderson Memorial Tunnel in Whittier, Alaska, where “vehicles and trains take turns using the tunnel’s one lane.” How about the number of battle deaths in the War of 1812? There were 2,260 (page 170).
The World Almanac is a marvel of organization. How do the editors manage to stuff so much information into such a small package, and yet present it in a readable, and reasonably accessible, way? Data are easy to find, and the write-ups are brilliantly concise. And the best part is that, when you find the fact you’re looking for, you’ll find some other useful fact, and then another, and then another—and the next thing you know, you’re totally unprepared for your World Card tournament.
As a Generation Xer, my formative years straddle the dawning of the Internet age, which I’ve long considered a blessing. Unlike the baby boomers, I’m quite comfortable with learning how to use new technology; unlike the millennials, I still appreciate the old way of doing things. By virtue of my date of birth, I know that newer is often, but not always, better.
The World Almanac is an example of the superiority of old over new, of paper over megabytes. Its main competitor is Wikipedia, which is in truth a terrible resource. Wikipedia is unreliable, with spotty, nonexistent, or lousy sourcing. And it’s hopelessly unbalanced—not just politically, but socially and culturally. You can find a detailed bio of virtually every Simpsons character but good luck finding much on New York’s old Sen. Robert F. Wagner (1877-1953). Its writing is uneven, and not just in sentence construction but also in what information is and is not presented. Wikipedia is exactly what you would expect from a website constructed by underemployed know-it-alls who lack strong editorial guidance.
The World Almanac is none of these things. It is trustworthy, balanced, and well-written. Wikipedia’s sole advantage is that you can find entries with one click while you have to thumb through a few pages of the Almanac. But that strikes me as a worthwhile price to pay for what is, in truth, a manifestly better product. And all this for $14.99. What a bargain!
I’m going to take Wikipedia off my bookmarks tab and keep my World Almanac handy for the next time I need to know the address of the Department of Justice, or how a cyclone works, or weight guidelines for adults, or the number of local schools in Texas, or where Warren Beatty was born, or . . .
Jay Cost is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.
