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Mining Footnotes with Simon
Winchester
by Mim Harrison
 Simon
Winchester was in the bath when he had his second epiphany as a reader. It
was the early 90s, and he was reading a book he had plucked from his New
York editor's bookshelf, at her invitation, called Chasing the Sun:
Dictionaries and the Men Who Made Them. The footnote was what caught
his eye: a casual mention of a "deranged American lunatic murderer" named
W.C. Miner who had been a longtime contributor to the Oxford English
Dictionary. Though he didn't realize it when he drew his bath, Simon
was baptizing what would become one of his most popular books, The
Professor and the Madman.
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A footnote about a "deranged lunatic murderer" led him to write The
Professor and the Madman.
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first reading epiphany had occurred in the late 1960s in a British Consul
library in Uganda, where Simon was halfheartedly pursuing his recent
Oxford training as a geologist. Coronation Everest, by a fellow
Brit named James Morris, was an account of the 1953 British expedition to
the summit of Everest. As with Chasing the Sun, it wasn't just the story that
captivated Simon. It was the idea that he, like Morris, might be able to
pursue a career as a travel writer.
"It was a moment of Pauline conversion," says Simon. "Reading
Coronation Everest changed my
life." (Footnote: Simon did, indeed, become a travel writer.)
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His father, a POW during World War II, urged Simon to pursue what had kept him sane: reading.
| To this day he still mines a book's footnotes and bibliographies
like a geologist boring through rocks in search of a gem. His own
bibliography for Krakatoa included works that dealt with the San
Francisco earthquake. "The earthquake had occurred in 1906, which meant
that 2006 would be the one-hundredth anniversary," says Simon. Thus was
A Crack in the Edge of the World conceived,
and published a few months before the centenary.
"My father was determined from day one that I would read," Simon
recalls. Dickens loomed large in the small boy's reading world. "Dickens
was a reporter of London life," says Simon, who would later work for the
English newspaper The Guardian, "and it helped in my becoming a
reporter."
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Taken prisoner
during the Falklands War, Simon was rationed one book to read, which he read
over and over—and never again.
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urgent reason for wanting his son to be a reader. He had spent part of
World War II in a German POW camp. Reading and keeping a diary kept him
sane.
In an eerie parallel, Simon was also imprisoned, during the
Falklands War in 1982. He was in Argentina as a reporter, but the
Argentinean officials were convinced that this Englishman, whose country
they were fighting, was a spy.
"There was only one book in English," says Simon,
"and the prison guard gave it to me. In desperation, I read it over and
over again." The book was one by Harold Robbins. "I've
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He loves Burgess and Bellow for their "weird and
wonderful words."
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since," Simon adds.
But he has willingly read George Perec's Life: A
User's Manual again and again. "Every book I write aspires to be as good
as that," he says. A self-confessed crossword junkie, he devours writers
such as Anthony Burgess and Saul Bellow because "I love reading that
introduces me to weird and wonderful words." He also loves to both write
and read standing up. Ever vigilant, of course, for the fortuitous
footnote.
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Simon
Winchester was a speaker at the Books & Books at Levenger author series
on April 13, 2005. His most recent book is A Crack in the Edge of the
World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906
(HarperCollins).
Mim Harrison is the editor of Levenger Press and the senior writer
for Levenger.
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