Dog Lover's Trivia

Back in the day charity shop shelves in the UK were stuffed with copies of Schott's Miscellany and all the thousands of offshoot volumes. I loved them, but they were hardly the kind of thing to leave on your shelves until the non-existent day you re-read them, and found them out of date. But the series lacked specific volumes concerning the other members of the household, and hence there were a "Sock's Feline Miscellany" and a "Spott's Canine" variant – both made by someone else, and both of which now retitled and brought to us afresh. That's as "afresh" as something containing 2006 doggy ownership data could be...

The pair of volumes at hand certainly keep the aesthetic and ethics of the originals, in that they are quite densely typeset, serious forms of trivia book. Nothing is over a full side, if that, and the gallimaufry of content comes at you with no structure – the subjects changing twice a page on average in very random fashion. One spread here covers the anatomy of the dog (complete with the etymology of a croupier, quite marvellously), the Iditarod race, Rin Tin Tin's origins as a knitted billet-doux, and more.

That more includes a couple of cut and pastes, or reversals, of the data as featured in the cat volume, but we can forgive that in a book this rich and fun to read. It may well be the case that the entity most edified by this is the dog-lover's bathroom windowsill, but I can't really object to my time spent perusing either of these volumes.

This was a fun easy read and gave some interesting trivia facts about dogs which I would never have thought of.

I was given an advance copy by the publishers and netgalley but the review is entirely my own