Faber Launches New QI Book of Sports
By Faber Editor, 16 June 2023
Faber will be taking its range of bestselling QI titles in a new and sporting direction with Everything to Play For: The QI Book of Sports by QI Elves James Harkin and Anna Ptaszynski.
Delving into the world of sports and employing the QI Elves’ legendary curiosity, the book is brimming with surprising facts and intriguing stories, including the psychology of football chants, comically large cricket bats, pole-vaulting priests and professional pillow-fighting.
Designed to delight sports fanatics and casual watchers alike, the book will reveal what David Attenborough has to do with yellow tennis balls, why Victorian doctors feared the outbreak of ‘bicycle face’; what led ancient Egyptian athletes to have their spleens removed, and much more.
This is the 23rd QI title to be published by Faber. Worldwide, QI titles have sold almost 4.5 million copies.
Associate Publisher Laura Hassan acquired world rights from the authors. Faber will publish in October 2023 in hardback.
Laura Hassan says,
‘Anna’s and James’s book is as joyful and fact-filled as you’d expect from the QI Elves, but the storytelling is utterly involving and entertaining too. You’ll be rooting for a Taiwanese tug-of-war team, be outraged by croquet skullduggery, admire the audacity of sporting history’s greatest cheats and discover the pure delight that is Puppy Bowl. It will whet even the sports refusenik’s curiosity because all human life is here: the rise of civilisation, psychology, war, money, substance abuse, success, loss, redemption and even Bhutanese archery. It’ll be an absolutely winning Christmas read.’
James Harkin and Anna Ptaszynski say,
‘At the end of the day, it’s a book of two halves, and we’re over the moon to have had the chance to write both of them. We always gave 110%, and we couldn’t have done it without the team at Faber, who really brought their A-game. But clichés aside, we’ve been excited for a long time to give the QI treatment to the world of sport. Sure enough, our research uncovered some incredible characters and unbelievable stories. We hope sports fans and non-sports fans alike will love learning about them as much as we did, because you don’t need any prior sports knowledge to enjoy what is really a book about human behaviour in all its weirdness. As another old sporting cliché goes, “you just couldn’t write it” . . . except we did.’
Anna Ptaszynski and James Harkin are senior researchers, writers and script-editors for the BBC’s QI, and two-fourths of the award-winning podcast No Such Thing As A Fish. Between them, they have authored 13 books with the QI Elves and toured sell-out shows across the world, from the London Palladium to the Sydney Opera House. They are, respectively, long-suffering fans of Charlton Athletic and Jacksonville Jaguars.
The most improbable, fascinating and endlessly entertaining sporting facts and stories, from prehistory to the present day.
