Ben Schott - Schott's Miscellanies

Schott's Miscellanies

As The Guardian wrote of Schott’s Original Miscellany, the first of Schott's three Miscellanies titles, "the idea for the book came from home-made Christmas cards that Schott sent to friends. They were no ordinary cards, but consisted of little booklets containing all of the essential information he supposed that one needed to get through life, but could never find". Schott typeset the book himself and had 50 copies privately printed by the Pear Tree Press in Stevenage. After sending copies out to his friends, he sent one to the CEO of Bloomsbury, Nigel Newton. As Newton told the Boston Globe, "I was completely bowled over when it arrived on my desk. It was a work of striking originality, and it was remarkable to receive an unsolicited submission like this in the mail. I immediately passed it to one of our editors, who signed it up."

Schott’s Original Miscellany was published with little fanfare, but an article by Stuart Jeffries on the front page of the Guardian’s G2 section on 6 December 2002 changed everything. Describing the book as the "publishing sensation of the year", the article said that “Schott has hit the list motherlode”. Sales raced up, and within weeks Schott’s Original Miscellany was at No. 1. Robert McCrum said of the book in The Observer: “Originality is like charisma. It's hard to define, but we know it when we find it ... Schott's Original Miscellany is without doubt the oddest, and possibly merriest, title you will come across in a long day's march through the shimmering desert of contemporary publishing”.

Schott followed up the success of the Original Miscellany with three sequels – Schott’s Food & Drink Miscellany, Schott’s Sporting, Gaming, & Idling Miscellany and Schott's Quintessential Miscellany. While the first two were bestsellers (Schott had two books simultaneously in the Sunday Times top ten), sales did not match the runaway success of the first book.

The Miscellany trilogy has sold well over 2 million copies, and has been translated and adapted into dozens of languages, including French, Russian, Greek, Swedish, Finnish, Italian, Serbian, Spanish and Japanese.