Will the Questions Suit a British, Canadian or American Reader?
Nostalgia trivia is written from a point of view. A question about Howdy Doody lands beautifully with an American grandmother and means nothing to someone who grew up in Yorkshire. Most listings never mention this, which is how a thoughtful gift turns into a polite thank-you and a book left on a side table.
Our trivia books are written mainly from a North American point of view. Rather than leave you to discover that, here are the numbers, counted from the books' own question ledgers.
The 80th Birthday Trivia Book
We counted with one rule: a question is "Canadian" if its text, its answer or its fun fact names a Canadian place, person, team or institution, and "British" by the same test. Of its 254 questions, 35 are Canadian by that rule, including Hockey Night in Canada and the singer Gordon Lightfoot, and 13 touch on Britain, among them the 1953 coronation and Roger Bannister's four-minute mile. The remainder are mostly American.
The 90th Birthday Trivia Book
Of its 202 questions, 28 are Canadian by the same rule, including the jazz pianist Oscar Peterson, and 7 touch on Britain, such as the Festival of Britain and the 1953 coronation.
The 50th and 60th birthday books
These two are built around a single birth year — 1976 and 1966 — and then the decades that followed. We have not counted their questions by country, so we do not publish a figure for them. Their music, television and toy questions lean American.
So who are they right for?
- An American or Canadian recipient: a straightforward fit, and Canadian players get a meaningful run of questions rather than a token one.
- A British recipient who followed American music, film and television — which is a great many people who were young in the 1950s and 1960s — will enjoy most of it, with 7 to 13 questions that feel like home.
- A British recipient whose memories are mainly domestic — the Light Programme, Blackpool, the FA Cup — will find the fit thinner. We would rather say so.
- For a group with mixed backgrounds, read the rounds aloud as a team game. Nobody minds not knowing an answer when somebody else in the room does.
The word search books are different
Puzzles sidestep most of this. A word search grid works the same wherever the solver grew up, and the themes are broad decades rather than specific events.
All our books are sold on Amazon.com, Amazon.ca and, for most titles, Amazon.co.uk. Buying from your own country's store only affects delivery and price; the book inside is identical.
