The Alberta Trivia Book

B.J. Busch is Associate Librarian (Access and Information Services) at
the University of Alberta.

The Alberta Trivia Book is loaded with information, most of it
interesting, some of it quite useless, albeit often entertaining. Such
is the nature of trivia collections.

Blake’s many careers—longshoreman and prospector, among
others—have clearly helped to develop his eye for minutiae. With a
B.C. trivia book already to his credit (This Is Beautiful British
Columbia), he set to collecting bits and pieces of information on his
adopted province.

An index would enhance the work’s usefulness as a reference source,
but there is a table of contents by broad subject categories: people,
places, history, sports, and so on. Black has emphasized the topics that
interest him, and anyone could add tidbits he has omitted. In fact, he
invites readers to send such items to him, along with verifiable
sources. There are black-and-white photographs throughout, although some
of them are not very clear.

Some items are not, strictly speaking, Alberta trivia, such as “Water
makes up over 80% of a tree’s total living weight,” or the paragraph
on the Mount St. Helens eruption in 1980. A final section includes
trivia “everyone should know”: the average doorway is two metres
high, the Queen will send a message on your hundredth birthday, the push
buttons on a telephone are one centimetre square. There is even an
Alberta-place-names quiz. This is a real potpourri of stuff, good
reading for out-of-province relatives and tourists.