Interview with Futility Closet blogger Greg Ross

Greg-Ross-1
Futility Closet is a blog about surprising passages found chiefly in out-of-print books. It's one of my favorite blogs. Greg Ross, who runs it, describes it as "An idler's miscellany of compendious amusements."

Mark Frauenfelder
You find such wonderful material to post on Futility Closet. Where do you find it all?

Greg Ross
Most of it comes from university libraries. I live in the Research Triangle in North Carolina, so there are a lot of big libraries to work in. About 80 percent of the job is prospecting and fact-checking. I keep a big list of story ideas, and the readers submit some great ideas, too, for which I'm grateful.

Mark
How do you go about "prospecting?" Do you browse aisles looking for interesting titles?

Greg
No, I've tried that, and it's just too hit-and-miss. I experiment with strategies like surfing catalog metadata and reading bibliographies, and then I track down each title in the stacks and evaluate it directly. Once I've decided on the most promising ones, I take them home to read more closely. Then I start the whole process over again. It takes a lot of time, but in the end I find there's no substitute for just reading a lot of books. And there's a surprising amount of luck involved; I think I've stumbled over most of my favorite books while looking for something else.

Mark
Tell me a bit about yourself: your interests, your background, your occupation, etc.

Greg
I'm basically a magazine editor, working mostly on science and engineering magazines. For the last 10 years I've been an editor at American Scientist magazine in Research Triangle Park. I started the blog six years ago, mostly as a way to mess around with web development, but it's grown so popular that now it takes up most of my free time.

I think most of my interests are reflected in the blog. When I started it I resolved to make a site that I myself would want to read, following O. Henry's dictum "Write what you like, there is no other rule." I'm continually surprised that other people like it so much.

Mark
You seem to have discovered a secret world of literature about surprising things. Could you name 3 favorite books that most people don't know about but should?

Greg
I haven't been able to find a general collection of interesting facts that's reliably accurate, alas, which is why I'm reduced to such wide reading -- the facts are out there, but they have to be gathered. My favorite books tend to be written by specialists who are passionate about their topics -- here are some:

Bad Acts and Guilty Minds, by Leo Katz, is a collection of puzzles in criminal law. "When a traveler smuggles some French lace past customs, and the lace is in fact duty-free, should he be punished for attempted smuggling?" Katz, who teaches law at the University of Pennsylvania, began collecting legal conundrums while clerking for Anthony Kennedy, and his fellow clerks "endured many a lunch hour conversation about cannibalism, overcrowded lifeboats, the killing of ghosts and the shooting of corpses." The book is wonderfully thought-provoking, and Katz's enthusiasm makes it great fun to read.

In the same spirit, There Are Two Errors in the the Title of This Book, by Dalhousie University philosopher Robert M. Martin, is a collection of 250 philosophical enigmas, puzzles, and conundrums. It reminds me of a book I loved as a kid, How to Torture Your Mind, by Ralph L. Woods, a collection of classic paradoxes, sophisms and fallacies. Woods gave no discussion, and he offered no answers -- he trusted you to see the point of each problem and to puzzle it through for yourself. In that way the book was a compliment to its audience, a model I've tried to follow with Futility Closet.

David Wells has produced two wonderful collections of mathematical oddities for Penguin: The Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Numbers and The Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Geometry. Both are written for an educated lay audience; the topics are of varying mathematical significance, but they're always interesting. Another good one in this area is The Universal Book of Mathematics, by David Darling.

Finally, some remarkably good older books are now available through Google Books, including William Shepard Walsh's Handy-Book of Literary Curiosities (1909), Eugene Beauharnais Cook's American Chess-Nuts: A Collection of Problems (1868), and Tryon Edwards' Dictionary of Thoughts (1891), a themed collection of once-famous quotations. Eventually I'll write a book myself -- I just need to find the time.

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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http://anthonybailey.net/ Anthony Bailey

The referenced work is actually called “There Are Two Errors in the the Title of This Book”.
- mrclamo
  
  Okay, I’ll be the dumb one. What are the two errors? I see the two “thes” but I don’t see anything else. Help!
  - http://anthonybailey.net/ Anthony Bailey
    
    So you’re saying that *as well as* the mistake with the repeated “the”, the title is *also* wrong in its claim that there are two errors…?
    
    (It’s a slight finesse on the classic “this statement is false” paradox.)
    - mrclamo
      
      Thanks! It was driving me crazy.
    - http://pineappledonut.org Lachlan Musicman
      
      +mrclamo I was thinking it was something like capitalisation in the title – but it seemed so *lame* . Thanks for the heads up.
Joe Carpenter

Great post! BoingBoing & Futility Closet are my two favorite blogs ever… I read them both thoroughly everyday and have even read through the archives of both. Thank-You!!!
Paul Terlecki

Man, I love that Blog. Of course found it thru B B.
I like to tease / tourture myself by not going there for a few weeks; letting it build up a bit, then savoring over all the goodies for an hour or so. Thanks for all Your time spent,
Greg Ross!
dr

Heh. When Leo Katz was preparing Bad Acts and Guilt Minds for publication, he phoned me for copyright permission on something of mine. (He included a short article of mine in its entirety in the book.) I thought that I had assigned the rights to the journal publisher (Blackwell?), but they were convinced that I had the rights. Of course, I gave him permission, repeating that as far as I knew it wasn’t actually mine to give.
A year or two later the same article of mine was reprinted again, this time by the Open University, who paid me royalties *without* asking me for my copyright permission. While I’m not about to return the royalties (I think it was a princely sum of around 50 pounds), I remain curious as to who actually had the rights to my article at the time.
awjt

I read it as “Fuzzy Closet” because of the photo.