The New York Times Almanac 2011: The Almanac of Record [ペーパーバック]

I bought this out of nostalgia. Growing up, I got an almanac every year for Christmas that I read heavily. I was a nerd and I still am. I also bought this as a reference book. I bought it most importantly because I needed to bone up on random trivia prior to an appearance on a nationally famous quiz show.

Almanacs by their structure are great books for random trivia. What other book can tell you Swaziland's prime exports and who won the 1965 World Series in an easy-to-look-up format that can be carried around? There is no other book, that's your answer. You can also have an internet-connected smartphone nowadays, but that is neither her nor there.

There are several published Almanacs, and I went and compared them head-to-head in a bookstore before purchasing any of them. In terms of layout and font, this is the most readable of the widely available texts. It is crisp and clean; it also had pretty much the same information, so I went with this one.

I sat and read the thing cover-to-cover over the span of three weeks. I don't know how many people do this, but I found it an enjoyable, meditative thing to do. There was, however, a problem. It needs editing. I counted seven different simple typographical errors before I stopped counting. That may be understandable, there's a lot of there here. It gets worse though.

There were at least two dropped columns. There was stuff about a thing in a form of a narrative and then nothing. It's like no one read through the thing after it was set and asked the simple question: "Where's the rest of this".

Then there's this. In the section covering world history, there's a bit about the former Portuguese colony of Macao, now under Chinese control. There's an aside about how it is "(Due to revert to Chinese rule in 1999.)" (442). This angered me to read, because it shows that there was an assumption somewhere that this section was set and no one bothered to even read it before carrying it over the next year. The problem is that this exact same thing has had to happen for at least 12 years because it keeps carrying over. To the editors' credit, the current state of Macao is correct in both of the country capsules on Portugal and China, but seeing this brings into question the accuracy of the data that I don't personally know.

The thing is, I am smart, but there is only a finite amount of stuff I do know and a near-infinite amount of things I don't know. A lot of that is raw data and numbers about which I have familiarity with but not an exactness of detail. That is precisely why you write things down and use an utilize reference books.

I kept reading though. The editing mistakes were grating, but I had not found anything factually incorrect. I found a math error, where something that was reduced by half was referred as decreasing by 100% (510). Now, a doubling is a 100% increase, but this is not transitive here, Times editors.

But then...

I found it...

The book, in at least one place, was...

Factually WRONG.

Queen Victoria, they say, was named Empress of India in 1836 (707).

This is not so, but I won't tell you what the real answer is. You need to look it up. Just don't use the 2011 The New York Times Almanac.

I don't think that one mistake is worth discrediting an entire thousand page book. Take any encyclopedia or almanac and you're bound to find a few mistakes if you look hard enough.

That being said, this almanac is very informative. I've only had the book for a few months and it has helped me on multiple occasions. There's not really much to say on this, it's just a great reference book.

Ordered this for my father for a Christmas present. According to my father this is the best almanac available. Easy to peruse and thoroughly covers a variety of topics. It is not however easy to find, I have been looking for it at a variety of bookstores for quite sometime to no avail. Finally I thought I should try Amazon. Sure enough it was easy to locate. In the past, because this particular almanac is hard to find we have bought other ones for my Dad. He was never happy, always insisting the NY Times one was the best, and the other ones were inferior and inadequate. He was thrilled when this one was delivered right before the holidays.