Numero Uno

By Stefan Kanfer

THE BOOK OF FIRSTS

by PATRICK ROBERTSON 256 pages. Clarkson Potter. $10.

There are some books whose reviews should run upside down. They are the volumes which mainly add up to a series of short answers--tomes like the Guinness Book of World Records or the Baseball Encyclopedia. Seven hundred twenty-three home runs; 895 miles below sea level--these are the replies such works elicit from the reader. The rest is merely a salaam to accuracy and arcana. Joining the shelf of unique reference books is another first: the first Book of Firsts by Patrick Robertson. A British civil servant, indefatigable researcher and humorist very much manque, Robertson has highly individual criteria for celebrity. Not for him the Joe Namaths, Henry Kissingers or Valerie Perrines of this world. The Robertson laurels go to "Manchester Jack," the first lion tamer (1835); M. Jolly-Bellin, first dry cleaner (1849); William Kemmler, first man to die in the electric chair (1890), and the late great George Crum, inventor of the first potato chip (1853). Surrounding these immortals is a pantheon of some 6,000 achievers and achievements, each one a monument to ingenuity or perversity. En masse, they provide the best argument settler since the first dictionary (Cawdrey's Table Alphabeticall, 1604). After The Book of Firsts, there should be no further disputes about any of the following: a) the identity of the first magazine; b) the inventor of the first contraceptive; c) the first woman jockey; d) the first sporting event ever televised. Now if only there were a compilation of coffee-table non-books entitled The Book of Lasts . . .

a) Mercure Galant, Paris, 1672;

b) Gabriel Fallopius, Padua, circa 1550;

c) Alicia Meynell, York, England, 1804;

d) baseball, between the Ushigome and Awazi Shichiku Higher Elementary Schools, Tokyo, 1931.

Stefan Kanfer

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