Number of times McDonald is mentioned in The Harper's Index Book: 2

Burger King: 0

Number of statistics taken from The Washington Post: 2

Number of statistics taken from John Love's McDonald's: Behind the Arches: 2

Percentage of pages containing complete sentences : 5

Percentage of pages which list the table of contents: 3

Number of entries in The Harper's Index Book: 1159

Number of entries which answer questions wars have been fought over: 0

The Harper's Index Book

By the Editors of Harper's Magazine

Henry Holt; 125 pp.; $6.95 pbk.

It started three years ago, when the editors of Harper's Magazine came up with a bright idea: to tell the story of modernity through its mundanity. Thus was born the Harper's Index, a monthly potpourri of pop trivia gleaned from the chroniclers and quantifiers of all things great and small. The result was a corps of diehards who didn't know they were interested in such micro-bytes of information as the percentage of Icelanders who believe in elves (5) or the diameter of the real-life "wheel of fortune" (8 feet, 6 inches).

The Index, with its acontextual presentation of pre-cooked information represents the ultimate reduction ad absurdum of fast-food culture. But its not a bland offering, as the biases of the editors are clear. When the hyper-trivial is left aside, the statistics in the Index take potent swipes at the American zeitgeist and all its hypocricy and self-indulgence.

The statistics attack American standards--sometimes literally, such as when it tells us of the 40 percent of Iowans who have a hard time singing "The Star-Spangled Banner. The Index, in fact, is unsparing in its depiction of the folkways of the Midwest. Nebraska, it turns out, has 376 one-room school houses. Half of first-time brides in Kentucky are teenagers. Turning its sights on the nation as a whole, the Index informs that every year 6312 postmen are bitten by dogs and that American's favorite meal is steak and potatoes.

Then there are the funny "idea" statistics. There are 245 one-liners in an average Henny Youngman monologue. (0.4 percent of which involve the taking of his wife.) At today's rates, George Bernard Shaw ran up a $50,000 postal bill in his lifetime. Chicago's libraries have 7500 copies of Catcher in the Rye outstanding.