Showing results by author "Simon Garfield" in History

In 1936 anthropologist Tom Harrison, poet and journalist Charles Madge and documentary filmmaker Humphrey Jennings set up the Mass Observation Project. The idea was simple: ordinary people would record, in diary form, the events of their everyday lives. An estimated one million pages eventually found their way to the archive - and it soon became clear this was more than anyone could digest. Today, the diaries are stored at the University of Sussex, where, remarkably, most remain unread.

All the Knowledge in the World is a history and celebration of those who created the most groundbreaking and remarkable publishing phenomenon of any age. It tracks the story from Ancient Greece to Wikipedia, from modest single-volumes to the 11,000-volume Chinese manuscript that was too big to print. It looks at how Encyclopaedia Britannica came to dominate the industry, how it spawned hundreds of competitors and how an army of ingenious door-to-door salesmen sold their wares to guilt-ridden parents.

As a boy, Simon Garfield started collecting "errors" - rare stamps flawed by printing faults and absent colours. As an adult his childhood obsession became a full-blown mid-life crisis. This amusing but painfully revealing account of a passion he was once only able to admit to people he could really trust traces his fascination for these tiny print slip-ups from the simple pleasures of boyhood to an attempt to create order out of chaos and finally the gradual decline and break-up of his marriage.