When I was growing up, I ploughed most of Roald Dahl’s output and selected titles from Enid Blyton. Additionally, I kept returning to a children’s publisher called Antelope Books – not to be confused with the political publisher Antelope Hill – which would feature works by authors such as Penelope Lively and Anne Fine.
But as much as I enjoyed novels, I definitely spent more time reading factual volumes. On visits to the library, I’d stay around the non-fiction section, finding books about subjects like why the weather acts like it does, how nuclear energy works, what happens at an airport, and so much more.
I owned a lot of books as well. Easily the best one was a thick A4-sized Reader’s Digest collection called How Is It Done? with simple explainers about the logistics of staging an Olympic Games, how a building is demolished with explosives, how and why Christo and Jeanne-Claude would wrap landscapes in material, &c. From what I can gather, no updated version has ever been released.
All the non-fiction books I’ve mentioned so far have one factor in common: they were from reliable sources. They would typically be assembled by established publishers and/or have a bibliography for further reading. Even today, my non-fiction YouTube subscriptions are carefully curated from established channels and/or who link sources in the description.
However, I owned some books that played fast and loose with such standards. The pages would often contain lists of nothing but facts – and I use that word loosely – along the lines of:
- From 1 June to 30 July 1987, a schoolgirl completely wore out a pair of shoes.
- In 1970, Clive Bunyan robbed a shop in Scarborough. He hid his face with a motorcycle helmet but was caught because his name was printed in large letters on the front.
- There is an African village where the women have to catch a once-weekly bus to go shopping, but it stops for only three minutes.
Looking back, I can imagine the authors going to the pub, sinking five beers and writing the most outlandish nonsense they could get away with.
However, while young readers tend not to have the type of critical thinking skills that older ones might, I was always happy to take what I read at face value and be entertained by all these ridiculous nuggets.
Gavin Cameron 