FACT finder

In her new book, Shari Kasman shows she can handle the truth

Back in 2015, I was paring down my book collection and wanted something in return for the rejects. Rather than selling them for pocket change at a yard sale, I decided to ask for facts.

With tape, scissors and a Sharpie, I transformed a cardboard box into a Fact Box. I attached paper and a pen for people to write down facts. My giveaway books fit into the box’s larger space and submissions went into the slot labelled “Fact Hole.” I wrote “Take a book, leave a fact” on a flap, and that’s how the space outside my west end home came to host an exchange of knowledge and ideas. Unlike the many Little Free Libraries scattered throughout the city, this box was temporary, sporadic and required active participation from the public.

The first submission I received suggested I plant a tree on my street and claimed that I was what made Toronto great. Despite the nice idea and flattery, this was not what I’d hoped for. I wanted actual, verifiable facts. So, I made signs to clarify my intentions. One of them read, “This is not a Personal Information Box!”

In my second attempt at fact collection, someone wrote that deaf people invented the football huddle. I found out that this was true: in 1894, at Washington, D.C.’s Gallaudet College, a school for the deaf and hard of hearing, players would huddle to prevent the opposing team from seeing what they were signing. I was excited to learn this piece of fascinating information.

I set the box outside, periodically, over the next two years, and eventually decided if I collected more than 100 facts, I’d make a book. The result, “Rocks Don’t Move and Other Questionable Facts,” contains photographs of 100 random submissions from anonymous passersby, one per page. People contributed facts about animals, drugs and food; they gave opinions on everything from my garden to the weather to David Bowie; and some offered information that was entirely false. I fact-checked everything and annotated the handwritten notes, so the book’s content is correct, despite some of the crowd-sourced information being unfit for a proper encyclopedia.

Certain facts were harder to check than others; some were virtually impossible. “The amount of cookies eaten each year would make a stack from here to the moon — at least.” This is certainly possible, but to verify, you’d need to know how many are consumed annually worldwide, which I couldn’t determine, though apparently Americans eat more than two billion per year. So, considering the distance to the moon and an average cookie height of two centimetres, a stack of 19.22 billion cookies could reach the moon, which I concluded was a lot of cookies. That’s the best I could do with the information I had. The most entertaining of the “facts” were the obvious false ones: “The average American thinks about Abraham Lincoln once a day”; “93 per cent of all facts are made up on the spot”; and “20 per cent of people don’t believe in helicopters,” which, I wrote in my annotation, sounded like a ride I didn’t want to take.

I never paid attention to the people who lingered at the box, so I didn’t see who submitted “facts.” I did, however, guess that the kid across the road left a few ideas for me. Based on his interests over the years — countries, languages, maps — I guessed he’d written four, though I didn’t tell him until the book was published. I guessed right.

This project began before “alternative facts” became a hot topic. Since then, my endeavour has become quite timely. “Rocks Don’t Move” documents a community project, reveals what people have on their minds and shows what they might think is factual. I’ve created a kind of print encyclopedia in an age when these volumes are essentially extinct. Writing something by hand, inserting it into a box outside someone’s house, and having it appear, years later, in book form is like modifying Wikipedia in the most analog way. And that’s a fact.