Booknotes

ROBERT FAMIGHETTI, AUTHOR, "WORLD ALMANAC AND BOOK OF FACTS 1999": Five years ago. And I've been involved in putting out reference books for a lot longer than that. And for my whole professional career and even before that, as a student, I was a user of The World Almanac; found it about the most useful book that I had ever come across. And then five years ago, I had the opportunity to become the editor of this book, one of the most valuable and most famous of all reference books. And I jumped at that opportunity and I'm glad I did. I've been having fun with it ever since.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: Our office is in Mahwah, New Jersey, which is in the New York City metropolitan area. And, of course, we have a staff in house and then also work with a good number of outside expert consultants and contributors. For example, there's a leading astronomer we work with in revising and updating the astronomy chapter every year. There's a leading tax accountant we work with in revising and updating the taxes chapter so that it always reflects the most current changes in the tax code. And so we do that in a number of subject areas.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: World Almanac has a pretty long history, actually. The first edition was published back in 1868 and one of the big news stories in that year, by the way, was the impeachment of Andrew Johnson. And, of course, here we are 131 years later and The World Almanac is covering another impeachment trial. But, anyway, the first edition was published back in 1868 and the first publisher was the New York World newspaper. And the book grew out of a collection of facts that the reporters and editors of the paper had put together, essential facts on a variety of subjects that they would use in house when working on their stories. And then someone came up with the idea that if this collection of facts is so useful to us, why don't we put it out in book form and maybe it'll be of interest and value to the general public as well. And I guess that turned out to be a good idea, because the book has been around for over 130 years, is still extremely successful, is about 10 times its original size. The first edition was a book of 120 pages, and this year The World Almanac is more than 1,000 pages. We've expanded the number of pages and the amount of information for the new 1999 edition.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: Well, the book's over 1,000 pages but it's not a cast of thousands that puts it out, although some people might think you need that. It's actually a half dozen very talented, diligent and hardworking people who are the full-time editorial staff for The World Almanac.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: Half dozen people working on The World Almanac and working very hard at it. And, as I mentioned a couple of minutes ago, we do have outside expert consultants and one of the real strengths of The World Almanac editorial staff is that they know, for every type of information, whatever the subject area, the best sources to go to for the most authoritative, objective, up-to-date information, whether it's economic statistics or transportation statistics or the top grossing films or the most popular TV shows or the wealth of sports statistics that are in the book.

One of the great values of The World Almanac is that the staff does so much legwork for the reader. We know the best sources to go to. We go to literally hundreds and hundreds of different sources in collecting information for each year's edition. And we pull together all of that raw data and edit it and format it and put it into a user-friendly presentation so that it's right at people's fingertips, easy to find, easy to read, easy to understand and there it is for you, just about any subject you want to know about; information on it and the answers to your questions about it are going to be in The World Almanac.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: Right. Right. It was...

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: I'm pleased to say it's in the millions and, of course, the majority of those are the paperback edition, which I think is a tremendous value. It's very popularly priced, $10.95 for the paperback World Almanac, more than 1,000 pages. A book that, if you keep it on the shelf at home, you'll be referring to it over and over again throughout the year. I know the book is very extensively used by students. Millions of people keep it in their offices, refer to it constantly. I know it's very popular with journalists who refer to it all the time. And we find ourselves quoted and our statistics cited in numerous articles in leading publications.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: Well, people can use it for just about everything. You know, if you look in the fine print in the front of the book, there's a statement that The World Almanac does not decide wagers. And that's our official position. But I believe that the book is actually quite popular with bartenders and can be useful for settling any number of arguments, whether it's, you know, what year was it that Joe DiMaggio set his hitting streak record or just how old is Meg Ryan or Paul Newman or Julia Roberts or any other show business personality you're interested in. So The World Almanac can settle a lot of arguments, even if we don't decide wagers.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: The company is PRIMEDIA Reference. That is the publisher of The World Almanac. And it's no longer published by a newspaper company but now by a major book and magazine publisher.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: It was actually bought from Scripps Howard.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: New York World.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: Right, was one of the leading newspapers in New York at the time.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: I'm sorry, I don't know.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: Well, I've worked in reference book publishing for my whole career and I'm interested in facts. I'm interested in all subjects. I'm interested in current news and developments. And so it was really a natural for me to be associated with The World Almanac. One of the things The World Almanac is, is a book of record on the year that's just closed. For example, there's a great deal of information in the current 1999 World Almanac that's a recap of the most important news events, most important trends of 1998. And we also have two photo sections. It's called 1998 In Pictures. And we reproduced there some of the most dramatic news photos of the year or memorable news photos or pictures that capture the most memorable news events, whether it's Mark McGwire hitting his 62nd home run or the last episode of "Seinfeld," which many people, you know, lamented. There's a scene from "Titanic" in our photo section. Naturally, that film was such a titanic success at the box office and won a record number of Oscars.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: We actually have a bunch of those scattered throughout the book. It's not news to anybody, I don't think, that the millennium is approaching and that's a time to kind of look back and remember some of the most important historical events or trends. And so for the past couple of years, we've been including Millennium Fact Boxes in a number of chapters in The World Almanac, where we take a look back at historical trends or put current information in context. And I think the one you were just showing was the Fact Box that was prepared by Arthur Schlesinger and we asked him to give us his choice of the 10 most influential people of the second millennium. And he did that and he gave us an intriguing list, I think. William Shakespeare...

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: Right.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: Yes, I do. He's a physician and one of his major contributions was discovery of the circulation of blood within the body.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: Well, I've got most of the book memorized. No, that's not true. You actually don't have to have a lot memorized because you could always look it up in The World Almanac. But, of course, I'm familiar with the content of the book.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: Well, we picked him because he's extremely well respected and prominent historian and I think his views on the subject deserve serious--serious consideration and--and carry some weight. And so we were interested to see what would his selection be of the 10 most influential people of the millennium. And, of course, one of the fun aspects of any list of this kind is that after you read it and find out and think about, well, what did Arthur Schlesinger think on this question, you can then sit back for a couple of minutes and come up with your own list. If I were picking my 10 most influential people of the millennium, who would they be and how would my list be the same as Schlesinger's, how might it be different? So I think any kind of top 10 list or most important list, it can be a source of, you know, a few minutes of just kind of thought and enjoyment and something intriguing to think about.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: He actually was paid a nominal fee. I don't think that was a serious consideration for him. I know that he's a lifelong fan of The World Almanac and I know he has had The World Almanac close at hand for many years and I think he enjoyed being a contributor to it and we really appreciate his contribution to The World Almanac.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: Right.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: Right.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: Well, it's one of the longer chapters in The World Almanac, and I think that reflects the fact that it's very high interest subject. Judging from mail we get, and we get thousands of letters a year, by the way, both conventional mail and, increasingly, e-mail messages these days.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: Well, people write for a number of reasons. I'm pleased to say we get a good number of letters from readers who just tell us how useful they find the book and--and how much they enjoy having it around and--and consulting it. And we get a lot of letters from readers who tell us what they'd like to see more of in The World Almanac, what subjects we should, in their view, cover in more depth or maybe even new subjects to take on. And we get a fair number of letters that talk about the sports section and we know that it's one of the more popular and most often consulted in the book. And so I think it's worth the space that we give to it.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: Well, of course, the basic historic documents, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, have been in The World Almanac for a good long time. And I think deservedly so. I think there'd be many occasions when a user might want to consult the actual wording of the Declaration or the Constitution, perhaps even at the present time. What does the Constitution exactly say about impeachment and what are the grounds for impeachment? Well, you can go to The World Almanac and look up the text and you'll find it there.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: Those have been written by the editorial staff.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: Yes. Yes, and, of course, they're revised as necessary and new ones added for each new president.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: Well, the rules for the presidential biographies are really the same as the rules for everything that goes into The World Almanac. We're trying to be, throughout the book, as factual and as objective as possible. You know, we don't see it as our role to put forth opinions or a particular point of view. I think the great value of The World Almanac is that it can give people in one place literally millions of facts. And so whatever the subject is that they want to find out about, they can go to The World Almanac and get a wealth of authoritative, objective facts and then they can use that to draw their own conclusions and inform their own opinions.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: Sure. It shows the rather dramatic decline in the percentage of the workforce in the United States that is engaged in farming. Certainly if you go back to the 19th century, it was a huge percentage relatively speaking. And today, I think it's something on the order of only 2 percent of all the workers in the United States who are still engaged in farming.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: Mm-hmm. You know, reflecting the mechanization of agriculture and the tremendous increase in efficiency yields per acre are--are huge compared to what they used to be.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: Sure. Sure. And there you're seeing a significant increase in the actual numbers of women who are in the workforce. And the percentage of women--the percentage of the total workforce that is female is much larger today than it used to be.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: That would be the latest year for which we would have authoritative statistics good for the comparison.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: We actually have hundreds and hundreds of different sources that we rely on for our statistics. A great many of them are agencies of the US government. Others include state and local governments, the United Nations, other international organizations, academic and research institutions, other non-profit foundations and, in some cases, commercial businesses or--or compilers of authoritative statistics in certain areas.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: Well, we--we're trying to maintain the goals of accuracy, authority and objectivity. And so we're assessing the sources of our information always against those goals. And wherever possible, if we can compare information from two different sources, we'll do that and hopefully we'll find a consensus and where we don't, we try to get to the bottom of the discrepancy and...

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: Well, I'll tell you. One of the challenges is, even though the book has 1,000 pages, how do we cram the information in? And I think we've gotten pretty adept at squeezing as many facts as possible onto every page. And if we had another 1,000 pages, we'd put in loads more facts.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: It's printed at a huge printing plant in a Buffalo, New York, area on an incredibly large and incredibly high-speed press. It's fascinating to watch. I really enjoyed the first visit I made to that printing plant, because you can see literally thousands of books coming off the press every hour. And the whole schedule for printing and binding and distributing the book is extremely condensed. We're trying to put the most up-to-date information possible into The World Almanac. For example, in the 1999 edition, we include all the results of the November elections of 1998, the results of all the Senate races, House races, gubernatorial races, major mayoral races in hundreds of cities. And this information, of course, was not available until after Election Day. And yet, less than one week after Election Day, printed, bound and cartoned books were already moving out from the printing plant and getting distributed across the United States so that the books would be available when the news was very fresh and also be available for the holiday season. The World Almanac is an extremely popular gift item at the holiday season.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: Oh, it must be easily half the books that have sold by Christmas.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: For a year. There's a new edition of The World Almanac published every November and so the edition is on sale for the full year and I think it can be a valuable purchase at any point during the year. It's also a very popular graduation gift, popular back-to-school gift. And I should also mention, by the way, that for younger students, we publish a World Almanac for Kids. And this follows The World Almanac format of covering a wide variety of subjects and presenting factual information, both useful and fun. But the whole presentation is geared to the reading level and the interests and the school subjects of younger students. And so that's a very nice gift item for someone who might find the reading level of The World Almanac a little difficult.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: We usually do it all in one printing.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: Yeah.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: The hardcover is a pretty small percentage. The vast majority of the print run is the paperback, although the hardback offers a larger type size, so for people for whom that is important, the hardback can be appealing. It's a very nice gift item.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: I believe it's the Audit Bureau of Circulation is the compiler of newspaper circulation statistics Or they may just do the magazine statistics.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: Right. Well, again, we're trying to cover as many different areas as we can. Many people might be interested to know or have occasion for a professional reason to want to know what are the largest newspapers in the country and what is their circulation. What are the largest magazines? What is their circulation? We have that information as well. And we do that for other kinds of media as well.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: Well, I'm a sports fan. I enjoy the sports section. I'm kind of a news junkie and so especially enjoy those sections of the book that cover current news. We do have a very detailed month by month chronology of major news events of 1998 in the current World Almanac. And that's events in all fields: national, international, general interest topics. I think for people who are interested in the arts and entertainment, they'll find a great deal of information in The World Almanac, whether it's top-grossing films of the latest year or of all time or, in our Noted Personalities section, we have key biographical facts about thousands of entertainers and other show business personalities. And we do the same thing for prominent individuals in all walks of life, whether it's art, architecture, science, literature, politics and government.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: The New York City area.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: In Queens, which is a borough of New York City.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: City College of New York. My major there was political science and I've been a follower of political and other kinds of news ever since.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: Oh, my goodness. Now I have to show how old I am. No, no, I graduated in 1967 and then went to law school for one year, then was a teacher for a couple of years and then went into publishing and have been in publishing ever since.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: For most of my career at Macmillan Publishing Company and for a good number of years I worked with Collier's Encyclopedia, which was published by Macmillan, and then moved to The World Almanac.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: Well, everybody answers to someone in the professional world and so naturally there's an executive of the company to whom I report. But I think we've been continuing to make enhancements to The World Almanac and I'm proud of some of those. The photo section has been in the book for four or five years now. That was a new edition for the first year that I was editor of The World Almanac. I'm very pleased that we have increased the number of pages in The World Almanac, as we did for the 1999 edition, to get even more information in the book. And...

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: We put in a good number of features that I think are very useful to people. For example, in our consumer information chapter, we added an article on the pros and cons of buying vs. leasing a car. You know, it used to be when somebody went out to get a new car, almost always the car was purchased, but that's not the case anymore. Something on the order of 30 percent of new cars are leased rather than bought today. And so it's an important decision for a lot of people, and we tried to lay out in this article in The World Almanac the factors that they might want to weigh, the pros and cons of buying vs. leasing. I think it's a very helpful article.

In our education chapter in The World Almanac, we've had for a number of years a very extensive directory of colleges and universities and we give a lot of basic facts about each institution--the size of the student body, the size of the faculty, the types of degrees offered, the key information on costs, tuition, room, board, other fees. And I don't think it's too surprising to many people that the cost of a college education can be quite high these days. And so one of the new features in the 1999 World Almanac is an article that presents an overview of the variety of student loan and other aid programs that are available to help pay for the cost of a college education. And this is a fairly complex subject. There are number of different programs with different eligibility criteria and the like. But I think we've given people in this new article in The World Almanac a good concise overview. And then we also give them sources to go to for further information. Again, I think another valuable feature.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: I'm not sure what caused that blip. Obviously, the general trend has been to put greater priority--and I think it's a good trend to put greater priority on more and more formal education, whether it's the percentage of students graduating from high school or the percentage graduating from college, which is also on the increase.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: Well, of course, early in the 20th century and, I guess, starting in the late 19th century, there was a huge wave of immigration, a lot of it from Southern Europe and Eastern Europe, including my own grandparents, by the way.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: From Italy. And then following that, I know there were some changes in the US immigration law and it became more difficult for immigrants to come to the United States. You would also--around the middle of the century, you'd have a dip around the time of World War II when there was not the ability for people to move and...

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: Yeah. Yeah. Now on the increase again.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: Well, we don't--we don't want to get involved in deciding wagers, but I like to think it's the authoritative source that anybody could use to get an accurate, up-to-date answer to any kind of question that they have.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: Well, that was something that he had written, and obviously, it's a statement that we're quite proud of. And the entertainment part is certainly as true as the information part. The World Almanac can be just fun to browse through. I think you can open to almost any page in The World Almanac and--and you're gonna find something intriguing there, whether it's one of the most popular colors among new car buyers today or a special feature in The 1999 World Almanac is what are the most popular baby names, and we actually show the most popular baby names today and for every decade of the 20th century. And so you can see how much different names have gone in and out of fashion. For example, among girls' names early in the century, I believe Mary was the most popular name, and today it's not even among the top 10, and the most popular girl's name today is Ashley.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: I believe that's affiliated with the University of Michigan, and they do an authoritative survey of college students.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: Yeah. That's an unfortunate trend, really, because I believe that staying informed is really essential for someone to be a responsible citizen today. I know voter participation is also down in general and is particularly low among younger potential voters. And it's a trend I'm sorry to see. You know, certainly the late 1960s was a time of great political activism and particularly a time of great political activism by younger people, college students and other people around that age.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: Sure. Well, I think the average family Is having fewer children than has historically been the case. I think households are less likely than in the past to include extended families. The number of households today that includes one parent rather than two is higher than it's been in the past. So there are a variety of trends that come together to make that household size be at a historic low.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: Yeah, but an interesting one, I believe. Sally Ride is a former astronaut. She was the first woman to fly on the space shuttle and she's currently a professor of physics at the University of California, and so we thought it would be really quite interesting to ask her, as part of our special features related to the millennium, to give us some predictions on how she thought science and technology would continue to change our lives in the next millennium--it obviously has in the current one. And I think she had some intriguing and some fun predictions that she included in her article. In the area of space travel, she has predicted colonies on the moon, manned space flights to Mars, and also for vacationers, the prospect that people might be able to take cruise satellites the way they take cruise ships today, and so a vacationer in the 21st century, perhaps instead of cruising three or four Caribbean islands, could board a cruise satellite to three or four orbits of the Earth and return presumably well-fed. So that sounds like a fun trip.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: Again, a very well-known, very respected historian, and we wanted his views on the ability to look into the next century and predict geopolitical events. And I think it's--his basic conclusion is that it's not easy because such predictions are almost inevitably a product of our current experience and our history. It's very hard in making predictions to not be bound and influenced by what you know today and what has gone on in the past.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: You know, sometimes we do. We get letters from people who feel they should be included, and we get a lot of letters from just average readers who say, `Gee, my favorite movie star is so-and-so, and I think you should add him or her to your list of entertainment personalities.' And we actually do add to that list all the time. We add to it every year and make sure that we're always up on the latest new stars who are becoming prominent.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: Sometimes we do, 'cause our reaction to that is really the same as our reaction to any kind of an incoming letter that talks about specific facts or information in the book. We take the suggestion seriously and we'll do some research on it, and if this seems like a legitimate addition, we'll make it.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: Right.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: Again, because of her expertise in the subject area, and this is a chapter of The World Almanac, the World History section, where somebody might think, `Oh, it must be the same every year. What could possibly change?'--you know, until you get to the most recent years--`What could possibly change? History is history.' But that's not the case, because there is constantly new research being done and new information being uncovered, whether it's manuscripts first coming to light or archaeological discoveries, and so even a section of The World Almanac like World History is definitely not static. We periodically will get an expert review of the chapter, and we are following news events ourselves, and we'll make revisions and do make revisions with some regularity to make sure that everything in that chapter reflects the latest scholarship.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: Right.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: Yeah. Well, each edition of The World Almanac is a best-seller when it's published, and it has held the number one position on The New York Times Best Seller List, and it's also on other best-seller lists, whether it's USA Today, Publishers Weekly, a leading trade magazine.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: It'll stay on the best-seller lists for a couple of months.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: Yes.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: It's a public company, and it's a very large magazine publisher and a very large publisher as well of educational material.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: In the area of consumer magazines, New York Magazine is published by PRIMEDIA. A great many of professional and trade magazines and special interest magazines are published by PRIMEDIA. Another example of an educational publication is Weekly Reader, you know, which has been a mainstay in schools for decades and still is today.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: No, it's actually quite spread out geographically. The corporate headquarters is in New York City and different divisions are located all over the country.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: Yeah.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: Yeah. And again, it's a documenting of an increase in apathy and perhaps some degree of alienation on the part of the public and potential voting public.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: Yeah. Different ones have been published for different lengths of time. None of them has been published nearly as long as The World Almanac. We have the longest history and I believe, of all of the almanacs. I'm pleased to say that The World Almanac has the most information in it and the most up-to-date information in it, and we work very hard to put as much utility into the book as possible, and I believe we're successful at it.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: New York Times and Wall Street Journal are fairly new. What's now the Time Almanac has been the Information Please Almanac, so that's been published for a little longer period of time.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: Our sales have actually gone up, and I'd like to think that the excellence of what we put into the book has something to do with that.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: Well, I--you know, we were there first and have the longest history, and so obviously we didn't copy from anybody else in putting this information together. Naturally, when the other books come out, we take a look at them And see what they've included and how.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: Well, I think a lot of people are interested in that, and I think that's also a very useful feature for students who very often need to get an image of a flag, learn the colors of certain flags for a school project.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: We work with a leading cartographic company which prepares the flag and the map section, and we do have maps that include every country in the world, and those maps are updated every year for The World Almanac so that they always include the latest changes in country boundaries, country names. The 1990s has been a really active decade for maps changing, whether it's the Soviet Union breaking up into 15 countries or Yugoslavia breaking up into six, or Czechoslovakia is now two countries, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, what used to be Zaire is now the Congo again. And so there's been a lot of map revision every year in The World Almanac map section.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: Well, I'm pleased to say that the biggest or maybe the most embarrassing mistake in The World Almanac that I've heard about is one that, thank goodness, happened before my time. I'm told that one year on the title page of the book, the word `almanac' was spelled wrong, and thank goodness I was not the editor when that happened.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: Well, of course, everything is looked over by several people, because it always helps to have different eyes looking at the same material. And in addition to the in-house editorial staff, we have various proofreaders who work for us and proof all the numbers and all the words. And in addition to that proofreading, there's review by the editors themselves, and easily five different people are looking at every page before it goes into print.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: Well, it's something we're thinking about all the time. We have editorial meetings all the time. Everybody on staff is a news junkie and is always reading a large number of newspapers, magazines, of course getting information from the electronic media as well. And so I'd like to think that we're pretty up on--on events and trends, and that gets reflected in the book. For example, if you go back, say, 20 years and look in The World Almanac, you won't find a separate chapter on computers and you probably won't find the word `Internet' at all. But today there's a major chapter in the book, The Internet and Computers, and there's a history of how the Internet evolved. There's a very useful glossary of computer and Internet terms. There's a chart of some fun smileys that people can use in their e-mail messages. There's a directory of very useful Web sites, both information Web sites and some just for fun. And so this is a case, one of many, where the contents of The World Almanac just keeps changing and evolving over time to reflect what's going on in society and in the world.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: It's included in a number of online information services, some of them geared mostly to consumers using them at home, and then some of them are information services that schools and libraries will subscribe to.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: No. There's not currently a CD-ROM that contains the text of The World Almanac on it.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: Well, you know, The World Almanac works so well as a book, and I don't mean to sound anti-technology at all, because I'm not. I use the Internet all the time myself, and sometimes I seem to be glued to my computer. But The World Almanac works beautifully as a book, even in the computer age, because there's so much information all in one place, and it's so accessible and easy to find that if you want a fact or you want the answer to a question, you can pick up the book and you'll get your answer much faster than booting up your computer. And, of course, there's a lot of information on the Internet and then lots of Web sites that one can consult, but it also can be time-consuming finding the right Web site for each particular subject. Plus, there's the issue of evaluating how objective, how reliable is this particular Web site and...

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: Yes. We do take surveys of that kind from time to time and, in fact, we're doing that with the 1999 edition of The World Almanac, and those results are starting to come in, and we'll be looking at them...

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: ...and using that information to maybe make some revisions for next year's edition and other future editions. Again, what are the subject areas that people are most interested in? What are the areas where they'd like to see even more information than we currently have?

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: Well, we don't really have the results of the survey yet, so I can't talk to what it's showing us. But we'll certainly be quite interested in what it shows, and we always want to be a high utility book for our readers, and so we want to know what they're most interested in getting information about.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: Well, I certainly wouldn't take Gutenberg off. You know, anybody in the book business is very fond of the inventor of movable type. But, of course, there are other names that could be on people's top 10 lists. Should Leonardo da Vinci be on the list, for example, whether it's--it's for his influence on art or his creativity as a scientist? There are any number of people who might be on the list. Should George Washington be on the list, or Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Jefferson?

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: Yeah. I believe that was their list of the greatest books published in English in the 20th century, and it was a list that got a lot of attention when it was published. Some controversy, as we've discussed, with any list of this type. There's room for people to disagree and come up with their own alternate suggestions. But we thought that a lot of people would like to have the list there and be able to consult it and refresh their memory as to what the selection was, and then be able to use that as a starting point and think about `Where do I agree? Where do I disagree?'

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: Mm-hmm. A similar line of reasoning. It's--it's a subject a lot of people are interested in. That particular list got a lot of attention when it came out. Again, a lot of commentary. Should this film have been on the list or not been on the list? Or should this one be higher? Should that one be lower? So it's another one of those features that somebody could just have fun with.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: Yes, I do.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: Yes, yes. I have a daughter who's 15 now.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: Yes. I'm pleased to say she uses The World Almanac all the time. She used to use The World Almanac for Kids, which she's outgrown it and graduated to the regular World Almanac.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: Well, I think just about every library in the country and virtually every school in the country will buy The World Almanac every year, and there are millions of people who will just buy it every year to keep at home because they want to have the most current information. Journalists--a great many journalists will buy it every year.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: Yeah. City College of the City University of New York. Who's to say why someone finds a certain subject area interesting? But I just always did.

Mr. FAMIGHETTI: Oh, my pleasure to talk with you.