Background: When I was the editor of Gilbert Magazine, I was responsible for the "Tremendous Trifles" column. It was occasionally hard to find a sufficient amount of interesting GKC material to fill the page, so John Peterson sent me a file full of Chesterton ancedotes. They were idiosyncratic, historical, and Chestertonian. He recently gave me permission to use them here. I hope y'all find them as interesting as I have over the years. Most of them have never been published.
Chesterton Short(s)
In June of 1932, a twenty-year-old Marshall McLuhan wrote his parents back in Winnipeg (he was en route to England for bicycling) with a practical suggestion. He urged them to enter a newspaper's "Believe It or Not" contest with Chesterton's A Short History of England, a history book that contains not one single date. [Letters of Marshall McLuhan, Oxford, 1987, p. 11] Of course McLuhan was quite wrong. Chesterton's Short History contains seven dates: 878, 1397, 1399, 1750, 1832, 1850, and 1914.
