Episode image is a detail of some of the notes made in preparation for this episode; photo by Charles Adrian.
For the 100th Page One (which, as Charles Adrian explains, is actually the 101st episode of the podcast), we are given a brainload of statistics. How many pages have been read in how many languages by how many people etc. If these and other questions have been exercising your attention, this episode is for you. Charles Adrian also shares something of his own and he plays some funny music and some beautiful music.
More writing by Charles Adrian, Camomile Tea, is discussed in Page One 78.
Haunted by Chuck Palaniuk is discussed in Page One 88, which features Susannah Hewlett.
This episode has been edited to remove music that is no longer covered by licence for this podcast.
This episode features a jingle written for the podcast by the band Friends Of Friends.
A transcript of this episode is below.
Episode released: 30th June, 2015.
Book listing:
7, from Why You Should Not Like Me by Charles Adrian Gillott
Links:
Episode transcript:
Music
[The Hundred Song by Flanders & Swann]
Jingle
You're listening to Page One, the Book Podcast.
Charles Adrian
Hello and welcome to the 100th Page One. That was Flanders & Swann with The Hundred Song at the top of the show. I'm Charles Adrian and this is my book podcast.
Today's episode isn't going to have very much actual book in it, though, I'm afraid. I thought that what I should do for this rather special episode is to go back through all of the episodes that have been up to this point and give you some statistics. You know, how many books have been read by how many people and so on.
Now, I did maths A-level back in the late '90s when that still meant something and I was pretty good at it. I really liked pure maths. I more or less got the hang of mechanics. I hated statistics. And the real problem with statistics, as far as I was concerned, was that it always seemed to take me far too long to arrive at a result that was totally unreliable—generally because of a whole series of very simple mistakes that I just hadn't spotted as I went along.
And it turns out that nothing very much has changed in the last fifteen or eighteen years. I don't know why I've persevered with this. But I think that you should know that the research for this episode has taken me hours. I mean hours. I mean six or eight hours over several days—just making lists and looking things up and noting things down and adding things together. I started a couple of days ago and as I was dropping off to sleep that night I realised that I'd forgotten to take into account the fact that I've had a couple of people on the podcast more than once, which meant that I'd miscalculated the number of guests I've had on. And, okay, that's not a very tricky adjustment to make but that was just the first of many similar realisations, most of which have had much more serious repercussions for the [laughing] calculations that were already in train. So be aware of that.
But despite that I'm pretty confident in my figures now. And as I have no intention of releasing any more of the data than is already online, I don't think that any of you are going to try very hard to pick holes in it. You should just assume that what I'm going to tell you is more or less correct.
I just hope that this isn't going to be too boring for you. [laughs]
Too bad if it is, though. I've done the work now. I'm going to give you my findings.
Okay...
[pages rustling]
... music first because it's relatively simple... and iTunes did most of the work on this for me: Over 101 episodes… Oh, there was there was something called Page One 30 early on, which didn't figure in the counting of the episodes so... It's not important. You just have to know that although this is called Page One 100 it's actually the hundred and first episode. That mistake took me a while to spot, by the way.
Anyway, over 101 episodes I have played 324 tracks by 281 artists. That's somewhere around 2 hours and 20 minutes of music. Oh, yeah, except that I remember that I didn't have the Rockford Cabine track that I played during the conversation with David Duchin—that's the 15th Page One—because he brought that on vinyl. So... So you should add another 2 minutes 20 seconds to that or so.
There have been 6 tracks by David Bowie—so he wins; 5 by Louis Armstrong; 4 by Nina Simone, The Beatles, and Elton John; 3 by Billie Holiday and Antony [sic] and the Johnsons; 2 each by Ani DiFranco, Barbara, the Carpenters, Einstürzende Neubauten, Flanders & Swann, the Fratellis, Greenday, James Blake, Konstantinos Vita, M Ward, Mark Ronson, Miranda July, Radiohead, Rufus Wainwright, Simon & Garfunkel, Sufjan Stevens, Taylor Swift, Tori Amos, Urusen, Van Morrison, Waldemaar, the White Stripes, and The xx. And 1 track by... all the rest.
Incidentally, anybody who's listened to the 99th Page One—my conversation with SooJin Anjou—might remember that I claimed not to have played any classical music to speak of on the podcast. ‘A couple of excerpts of Rachmaninoff but that's it, you know?’ That's nonsense. I've played lots of classical music. I'm not going to list it all now but... but I have and I... I remembered that now, having gone through all of the stuff.
So, anyway, that's the music. If you wanted to listen to all of the Page Ones, by the way, you'd need something over 2 days. A scientifically accurate 2.1 days, in fact, according to iTunes. How much exactly is 0.1 of a day? 2.4 hours. Is that right? Okay. So what's 0.4 of an hour? Hang on...
[typing on calculator]
24 minutes, according to my calculator. So you'd need... Okay, so you'd need... If you wanted to listen to everything back to back you need 2 days, 2 hours and 24 minutes, in case you've got that to spare.
Right. Guests.
[pages rustling]
Okay, so I haven't done any real number crunching on the guests but I can tell you that—after correction for error—I've had 73 guests over 75 Second Hand Book Factories and 1 live episode. Alan Cunningham has been on twice—he was on the live episode, as the two people who were in the audience on that occasion will remember—and Vera Chok, as is only right and proper, has been on the podcast 3 times. There have been 37 women and 36 men. My ethnic mix: not so impressive but I'm pretty pleased with my gender stats. Now, I can't give you any clearer information about nationalities represented because there are all kinds of mixes and moving bodies and... you know, without contacting everybody to ask it's just too complicated. But I can tell you that looking down the list I would say that my guests represent some kind of contact—either through birth or heritage or passport or current country of residence—with 15 countries. That's okay, isn't it?
Right, that's out of the way. So now...
[pages rustling]
Okay, now we can get to the real stuff. This... This is what's taken me the time. [laughing] You probably won't be able to understand why it should have taken me quite so many hours but... but just know that it has.
The books. This is pretty cool, I reckon. There have been 327 books introduced in some form or other on the podcast and 2 magazines. Altogether, I reckon that 334 first pages have been read. That figure might not be entirely correct—a couple of extra pages might have slipped in here or there that I've forgotten about, some of the pages might not have been first pages strictly speaking. There have been 311 named authors, 3 anonymous authors and one of the authors is married to one of the others. I didn't know this until a week or so ago but that makes me happy. I don't know why it should make me happy but it does. I find that pleasing. And here... Okay, forget about the ethnic balance, my gender balance among the authors is rubbish: 87 women and 219 men. That's 2.5 men to each woman. 5 authors are unidentifiable for various reasons but it wouldn't much matter if they all turned out to be women: there's there's no saving that statistic.
Oh, and it's occurred to me that I could also have looked to see how many are alive and how many are dead but [sighs] I'm not going to do that now. You can do it if you like. My hunch is that there are more dead authors but I have no particular reason for believing that. Oh, but a discovery! Okay: back in November 2012 when I read the first page of Mr M. A. Titmarsh's The Rose and the Ring—of which I have an 1855 second edition that no longer quite holds together—I had no idea that M. A. Titchmarsh [sic]... Titmarsh, sorry—he's not the gardener's namesake—was in fact William Makepeace Thackeray. That's pretty cool, no? Anyway, I think so.
Right here's the leaderboard for the authors: There have been 5 first pages from Lawrence Durrell—that's because a whole episode was dedicated to his Alexandria Quartet; 3 first pages from Margaret Atwood (hooray!), Lewis Carroll and Angela Carter; 2 first pages from John Betjeman, Georgette Heyer, George Orwell, Richard Brautigan, Sinclair Lewis, Virginia Woolf, Kingsley Amis, William Shakespeare—that's a bit dodgy, actually: one of the first pages was a kind of publisher's note but I'm letting it stand—Haruki Murakami, Patrick Ness, E. M. Forster, John Wyndham, Daphne Du Maurier, Muriel Spark, Iain Banks, John Le Carré, Colm Tóibín, David Foster Wallace, Patricia Highsmith, P. D. James, Iris Murdoch, Bill Drummond and George Gömöri.
That was interesting, wasn't it.
One thing that you might find interesting—I don't know, I try to... I'm trying to rescue my whole gender statistic—there are only... of the repeated authors there are only twice as many men as women, if that makes sense. 9 to 18. I don't know if that makes anyone feel any... Well, I don't know if that makes me feel any better. That's the... That's really the point, isn't it? That's what it comes down to.
Anyway. So—to carry on with what I've discovered—so the first page of J. R. Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring was read twice. Both times by me. I'd forgotten that I'd already read it. The first page of Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City was also read twice. And Carl Sagan's Cosmos was read from twice but I don't think it was the first page both times. I'm too lazy to check at this point.
Over the course of the 75 Second Hand Book Factories, 75 books were given by me to my guests. Them's the rules, right? 70 books were received and from fewer than 70 guests, okay? Some people gave me two books and some people—I'm not going to name names but... well, anyway, let them look to their consciences. Of the 70 books that I did receive, 53 have been read in their entirety—one of those was read and returned, incidentally, because it was too precious to be given away; that's fine—3 books have been begun and not finished for various reasons and 2 books are in the process of being read right now.
Okay, and language: So, 14 first pages were read in an original language that is not English—to wit: 5 in German; 4 in French; 3 in Italian; 1 in ancient Greek; and 1 in modern Greek. 46 first pages were read in an English translation from a foreign language—so 10 from French this time; 5 each from Russian and Spanish; 4 from Japanese, Italian, and German; 2 from Latin, Arabic, and Hungarian; and 1 from Danish, Swedish, Czech, Ukrainian, Modern Greek, Ancient Greek, Hebrew, and Chinese.
1 of the first pages was translated from English into French; 1 from Russian into French; and 1 from English into Modern Greek. Modern Greek sounds wonderful, by the way.
Now, at this point I was going to say that I haven't done an analysis of how many countries are represented among the authors. But then I thought, ‘Why not? What's another couple of hours?’ Most of the authors are Googleable, of course, so I'm pretty sure about most of this. In one or two cases it's guesswork. In two cases I've just put a question mark. Also, I should point out one slight inconsistency: I've counted both Homer and Plato as Greek because they probably lived inside what we call Greece but I've called Marcus Aurelius Roman because, well, he wasn't born in what we call Italy and although he spent a lot of time there—being emperor and all—he also spent time in other places and the... the Roman Empire was just bigger and more complicated geographically than ancient Greece during that period. I mean, the period of Homer and Plato. C. P. Cavafy, who was ethnically Greek, I have described as Egyptian because he lived in Alexandria and it was Egypt then. Still is.
So. Of 311 authors: 138 are from the UK (no big surprise); 83 are from the US; 12 are from France; 8 from Germany; 7 from Canada and Italy; 6 from Ireland; 5 from Australia and Russia; 3 from Argentina, Japan, and Greece; 2 from the Czech Republic, Switzerland, India, Nigeria, and Egypt; 1 from Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Austria, Poland, Hungary, Ukraine, Lebanon, Israel, Tunisia, Senegal, South Africa, China, Tibet (I know but it's the Dalai Lama so...), Cuba, Chile, New Zealand, and the Roman Empire. There's also one Native American author, Linda Hogan, who I count as Native American rather than American or Canadian—I actually don't know where she lives—because firstly that's how she describes herself online and secondly the two are not the same thing. Okay?
There are, as I say, 2 unknowns.
Now there are a few authors of fluid or mixed nationality, which is inconvenient but obviously we have to deal with that, it's the way the world is: T. S. Eliot and Patrick Ness are counted as British although they were born in the US; Hilaire Belloc is also counted as British although he was half French and born in France; Jonathan Swift is counted as Irish although he was half English; Vladimir Nabokov, Martin Ebon, and Junot Diaz are counted as American although they were born in Russia, Germany, and the Dominican Republic respectively; Carol Shields and George McWhirter are considered Canadian although they moved to Canada from the US and Northern Ireland respectively; and Eric Emmanuel Schmidt is considered French although he's also half Belgian. The one Belgian listed, by the way, is Georges Simenon. I've already told you about the Greek-Egyptian C. P. Cavafi.
So I reckon that—all in all—37 countries or geopolitical entities are represented one way or another. So that's... I think that's pretty good.
Now, I've done no analysis of ethnicity and I don't intend to—it's too complicated and the results will be far too depressing—but what else could I give you? Do you want a list of all the books in order?
No? Good.
So that's it. That's all I did. That's the result of—what did I say?—six or eight hours of work. Honestly, get me to solve a differential equation and I would have at it with a smile but this is just... [defeated noise] There are people who work with statistics! There are people who choose to work with statistics! There are people who enjoy working with statistics! It's extraordinary.
I should probably say that I'm not going to start talking about which of the episodes are my favourite or which books I've particularly enjoyed. I mean, there are one or two that stand out but it's divisive and... and I'm not going to do it. You can contact me privately if you're interested.
Now, you'll realise, of course, that all of this has been a description of the past. It's a round-up, right? From the first episode, which went out on Mixcloud—where presumably it still is—on the 9th of October 2012 all the way up to this episode, which is due to go out on iTunes on the 30th of June 2015. You can work out how many days separate the two if you want. But... But what happens now?
Right. So the truth is that I'm no longer going to be putting out this podcast in anything like a regular fashion. There are still people I'd like to talk books with so there will almost certainly be future episodes but these will dribble out like the last drops at the urinal. There's a patriarchal image for you. Meanwhile, I want to start thinking about a different podcast that will also come out irregularly—I'll let you know about that—and, well, who knows what else. Other things.
For the rest of this episode I wanted to read something of my own. I hope that's okay. It's in three parts but it's only a page long so I think it counts. And then I'm going to play some music. And then there will be the jingle—the music for which is by Friends of Friends, by the way. I haven't... I haven't said that enough over the last two years and they made me a wonderful jingle. I've really... I've... Yeah, I'm very happy with it. I love... I love it. Thank you so much, guys. And then... And then... yeah, after the jingle this episode will be over.
I hope you're all having a wonderful day. Thank you so much for listening to my podcast. It's... It's really... It's so nice to know that people are downloading this and listening to it and—hopefully—enjoying it. I mean, I assume you're enjoying it. Otherwise you'd stop downloading it, right? Maybe you have stopped downloading it. Maybe it's a whole different group of people downloading this podcast every time. Wow. That would be pretty cool too. I don't have a way of running any analytics on that. THANK THE LORD.
Right. My head hurts so I'm going to stop now. I recorded this earlier. It's just called 7 because it's the seventh piece in a collection called Why You Should Not Like Me. If you're interested you can find the other pieces at charldrian.wordpress.com. The music is called 100 Years From Today and, as I say, it's by Doris Day and Harry Zimmerman. Did I say that? Oh, I don't think I did actually. Okay, well, anyway, I have now. Doris Day, Harry Zimmerman. Yeah.
Here's the page I've written. Thanks, guys.
7
I
I saw a dead cyclist once. On the tarmac of a hill road near the city. His bicycle was still wedged in the windscreen of the four-wheel-drive that had come around the corner on the wrong side of the road and I was surprised at how much this shook me up. There was a Japanese garden at the corner, which I went into for a moment to recover my calm. I still visit that garden, in my head, when things are difficult at home.
The other day, for example, I put a new blue towel in with his white washing. We don't deliberately store things up to use against each other, I think, but I saw him look pleased when he found out what had happened. I recognised the look because I have been doing the same.
II
Sometimes, as the months go past, I feel as though we are ghosts, moving around each other. It's as if we rub each other out. He doesn't hurt me so much any more. I suppose he doesn't need to.
III
I miss him most in the morning.
Music
[100 Years From Today by Doris Day and Harry Zimmerman]
[Initial transcription by https://otter.ai]