“The Book of Lists” and The Wonderful Wallaces

This will be a telescopic post: about my own times, but also (by way of a stimulated imagination), all of human history as well. Most probably The Book of Lists (1977) will require no introduction to people of my own age and older. In the age of the internet, it will sound quaint. It was essentially an entertaining compendium of what we now call listicles covering nearly every subject of human interest. It was a perfect book for grazing. You could pick it up, open to any page, and find something compelling, and it was easy to get lost in for hours, especially if you were, like me, twelve years old when it hit the bookstores.

In fact (and this is my purpose in writing this post) The Book of Lists could even be intensely educational. This book was my pathway to many abiding interests that would remain permanent. I was introduced to historical figures, philosophers, world leaders, and remarkable yarns by this book. It’s very interesting to me that Steve Allen launched The Meeting of Minds the same year. A lot of it is what we now refer to as “trivia”, although as always I contend that a lot of what is given that label isn’t remotely trivial. I learned who people like Goethe and Kant were, for example, but also about Jeremy Bentham, whose corpse was perfectly preserved and kept on constant view at the University of London. THAT’S the kind of stuff I was drawn to. It was full of stuff about artists and decadence and Victoriana. I learned about the sex lives of Casanova and Cleopatra and Catherine the Great. I learned about aphrodisiacs, nymphomania, sadism, and masochism. I learned about drugs like laudanum and mariani wine. I was introduced to the topic of gourmandism and learned that Balzac was a coffee freak (lock yourself in a room for 12 hours and just write while becoming berserk on caffeine? Sounds like a plan!) The Book of Lists was also very good on freak show stuff (tallest, shortest, fattest people, etc); murderers and villains like Jack the Ripper,Charles Manson, and Lizzie Borden; and the paranormal, including famous ghosts, tales of levitation, spontaneous combustion, and UFO sightings. Naturally, the Predictions of Nostradamus were not neglected! There was a picture of Hitler’s mother, and one of of Herman Goering, in the context of his morphine addiction.

In connection with those latter lurid images — there was also a list of 15 top Nazis who were then STILL AT LARGE! So, one of the new joys of The Book of Lists is looking at it as a record of its own times. For example there are several polls of the most “Hated and Feared” figures in history. At that time, Richard Nixon and Idi Amin were included alongside the likes of Hitler, Mao and Stalin.JFK was still listed as one of the best Presidents and one of the top historical heroes. (It had only been a decade and a half since the assassination. Today, I think, both historians and the public have a clearer perspective on his true place). Also O.J. Simpson then topped every kids’ list of contemporary heroes. (Thus the trauma many of us experienced in relation to the events of 1994. He wasn’t just some random athlete). Another interesting slice of the times: at the time of the book’s publication, the longest reigning world leader was The Shah of Iran. One conspicuous symptom of the period’s biases — there are lists of famous gays, lesbians, and bisexuals. In other words, so few were “out” you could make a list of them, and they were considered so very remarkable and anomalous on account of their sexual preference that you’d scan a list of them as though they were sideshow performers.

In the arts section, there were lists of things like the greatest books and the greatest films of all time. Chaplin movies almost always made critics’ top 10 lists back then, one of my paths to discovering him (I fear that would no longer be the case now). There was also a list of worst films of all time which also influenced me greatly.Dr. Demento contributed a list of the worst song titles. I was also particularly delighted by a list of the longest words in English, a couple of which I took care to memorize.

Not surprisingly, The Book of Lists was created by the father-son team of Irving Wallace (1916-1990) and David Wallachinsky (b. 1948), who’d created the similar but more encyclopedic People’s Almanac (1975), as well as Irving’s 22 year old daughter Amy Wallace (1955-2013), and to a much lesser extent, his wife Sylvia Wallace (1917-2006), a former editor for Modern Screen and Photoplay, who went uncredited. I probably would have written about The Book of Lists anyway, but when I looked into its creators, I found them more relevant to the normal content streams of this blog than I knew.

As you’ve guessed from David’s name, the original family surname was Wallachinsky; it had been Americanized when the family immigrated, but David chose to defiantly switch it back. Irving was born in Chicago and raised in Kenosha. He began writing magazine stories as a teenager, which led to a couple of early screenwriting credits on the films Jive Junction (1943) and That’s My Baby (1944). He lucked out when he was assigned to Frank Capra’s motion picture propaganda unit during World War Two, helping create the Why We Fight series alongside fellow soldier Theodore Geisel (Dr. Seuss). Many of the screenplays he worked on after the war were for movies that are quite well known, including The West Point Story (1950), Meet Me at the Fair (1953), Sincerely Yours (1955) with Liberace, and Irwin Allen’s The Big Circus (1959).

No doubt as part of the research process for the latter script, Wallace also wrote the 1959 biography The Fabulous Showman: The Life and Times of P.T. Barnum. He then went on to considerable success as a writer of potboiler novels, several of which became movies. These include The Chapman Report (book 1961, film 1962); The Prize (book 1962, movie 1963); The Man (book 1964; movie 1972); The Seven Minutes (book 1969, movie 1971); The Word (book 1972; tv mini-series 1978); and The R Document (book 1976, made into a Soviet film in 1985!). There were also several non-fiction books which were clearly spawned by the minds of the people who brought you The Book of Lists such as The Fabulous Originals: Lives of Extraordinary People Who Inspired Memorable Characters in Fiction (1955), The Square Pegs: Some Americans Who Dared to Be Different (1958), The Nympho and Other Maniacs: The Lives, the Loves and the Sexual Adventures of Some Scandalous and Liberated Ladies (1971), The Two: The Biography of The Original Siamese Twins (1978), and The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People (1981). In later years, there were many sequels to the book of lists, and other books with similar formats and subject matter.

Meanwhile, David became well known for writing several books about the history of the Olympic Games, and (with film critic Michael Medved the book What Really Happened to the Class of ’65? (1976), which was adapted into a tv series a couple of years later. In addition to the books she co-wrote with her family, Amy wrote The Prodigy: A Biography of William James Sidis, America’s Greatest Child Prodigy (1986) and a memoir entitled Sorcerer’s Apprentice: My Life with Carlos Castaneda(2003). With Handsome Dick Manitoba of The Dictators she co-wrote The Official Punk Rock Book of Lists (2007) and with other collaborators The Book of Lists: Horror (2008). I’ll go out on a limb and imagine that David was point person on the sports stuff in The Book of Lists, and Amy did the same for matter having to do with sex, drugs, circus freaks, and rock and roll. And the parents for movie stuff. Just my gut.

At any rate, they’re like the Four Cohans of publishing, right? I salute them today for the many happy hours they have given me over the course of my life. I’m not usually into light entertainment, unless it leads me to the harder stuff, and The Book of Lists absolutely did.

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