Speed Reader

Most of you will have at heard of Schott's Miscellanies, if not actually received one or two for Christmas at some point. If you haven't, it's quite a cool story; albeit one of those ones that makes you slap your head and wish you'd thought of it first.

Ben Schott is a photographer who made little booklets containing photos and quirky facts to give to his friends and clients at the end of each year. They grew in popularity, one thing led to another, and Schott's Original Miscellany, a random collection of odd trivia, was born.

Within a very short space of time it had spawned a couple of themed follow-ups (Schott's Food and Drink Miscellany; Schott's Sporting, Gaming and Idling Miscellany), had collectively sold about two million copies and been translated into 13 languages.

This all happened about five years ago, and not surprisingly, an assortment of similar titles have appeared since. There are at least two relating specifically to F1 that I am aware of - one that I haven't actually seen (but it got roasted by Amazon customers), and Alan Henry's Grand Prix Companion, which is sitting next to me as I write.

People who regularly click on this column by accident might be hearing alarm bells at this point, as very few of the many Alan Henry books to have landed here have been particularly well-received. Indeed, his Top 100 Formula One Drivers of All Time got a rather unenthusiastic response here just two weeks ago.

If that's the case then you are in for a surprise - as was I, it has to be said - because this book is not bad at all. It's not great - there are too many shortcomings for that, which I will address later - but it deserves a place on a bookshelf, as distinct from being wedged underneath one to keep it stable (which is where Top 100... ended up).

It is, in the Schott's tradition, a random assortment of recollections, facts, figures, lists and trivia. There's deliberately no real structure, so you can just open it up at any random page and start reading.

Where it differs from many similar sorts of books is that Henry occasionally draws upon his own recollections or anecdotes from the hundreds of Grands Prix that he has attended. Many of these are stories that are previously unpublished, and it scarcely needs to be said that they are far and away the best thing about this volume.

Henry has an excellent sense of humour, and this is perhaps the first of his books where it has translated onto the page. More than once I found myself laughing out loud, which was rather unfortunate as I was on the Tube at the time. Passengers on the Victoria line get a little freaked out when a guy sitting on his own gets the giggles.

It did make me think, though. Almost as long as I have been writing this column, I have been giving lukewarm or worse reviews to Alan Henry's books. One of my most frequent criticisms over the years is that too many of his books read like hurried cut-and-paste jobs.

Now, when I started working in F1 more regularly last year, I inevitably started to encounter Henry in the media centre. And I couldn't work out how someone so funny, so knowledgeable, and holding the respect of so many significant figures in the paddock, could turn out so many below-par books.

Meeting Henry face-to-face could have been embarrassing given my track record of sledging his books online, but up until now he has never said anything. There could be a few reasons for this.

1. He doesn't read this column. In that case it's disappointing, but I'm off the hook.

2. He does read the column, but hasn't put my name to my face yet. Which means I'm in for another year of tip-toeing around the media centre until he twigs.

3. He does read the column and has figured out that I'm the author, but either doesn't care about criticism (after all, his books do sell), or thinks I'm out of line but is too polite to say so. If it's the latter, then it's made me feel a little guilty.

Anyway, while reading Grand Prix Companion I had my Alan Henry Eureka moment, and figured out exactly what it is that I've been wanting from him all along - the benefit of his experience, which is something that is singularly missing from so many of his previous books, and which does so much to colour up parts of this one. If Henry ever decided to do an autobiography along the lines of Eoin Young's 'It Beats Working', I'll buy it in a heartbeat.

Little episodes like this, for example, were magical:

"One of the lesser-documented episodes of the great good humour which existed between Britain's James Hunt and Austria's Niki Lauda during their epic battle for the 1976 world championship came on the morning of that year's Canadian GP at the Mosport Park circuit near Toronto.

"They were occupying adjacent hotel rooms and, just before they left for the track, Niki suddenly came goose-stepping into James's room, completely togged up in overalls, helmet and balaclava.

"'Today I shall vin zee vorld championship', he announced, before turning on his heel and goose-stepping out again." (p.60-61)

Similar anecdotal scraps are interspersed with reprints of some of Henry's columns from various magazines. Some are more interesting than others - the F1 budget breakdown and the diary of the design process of the McLaren MP4-21 were great - but most can stand up to revisiting, although I guess in my case the fact that I hadn't read the majority of them first time around worked in their favour.

The one area that I have to take issue with is the biographies of the world champions, several of which bear a startling resemblance to the biographies in 'Top 100 ...'. Earlier I referred to my past criticisms of Henry for cutting and pasting, but in this case he's doing it to his own books.

Given that Grand Prix Companion came out a year before Top 100 ..., this is really an additional strike against last week's book than this one. But it's still depressing - is it really that hard to come up with another 500 word bio from scratch?

That aside, I enjoyed Grand Prix Companion far more than I expected to. It's not one of those books that you spend a few weeks with - I knocked it over in a day - but at its best, it is an entertaining distraction, and well worth flicking through if you come across a copy.

Read it, savour Henry's recollections about his past - and contemplate how many similar tales he might still have tucked up his sleeve...