Last night, I took a look at a book in the bookstore: Schott's Original Miscellany. It's small book that's gotten, to my mind, a surprising amount of publicity. (NPR and Entertainment Weekly both covered it in the past week, which is how I heard about it.) Apparently it did brisk business in Britain and then has done a decent deal here (It's in amazon's top 10). It's not bad, it's certainly got interesting material. Though I cringe when I see an entry that's labeled "Some..." or just one flag being described (the feeling of "why that or those, but not these?"), I did pick up a few things I hadn't known before, which really is the whole point of the book.
I think the interesting thing about it is that, when I was finished leafing through it, I immediately had the thought: "You know, if I were to list all the things that people have ever drummed out of quiz bowl, on the grounds that 'that's not quiz bowl', I'd basically have that book written." I'm not sure whether that's a credit to the book (in that it's covering things that are interesting, without being part of stuff we cover) or an indictment of what we do. The sales figures would indicate that there's an interested body of people, who enjoy this sort of thing. That tells me that those who bought this could just as easily be interested in quiz bowl, and integrated into the circuit in some fashion.
I see two approaches that could be taken. The first would be the obvious, take this as something to include in packets. While I think that would be fine when dealing outside of the currently established circuit(say building up bar trivia or the like in the quiz bowl format,) the moment you tried to bring that to the established circuit, it would set you up for flak. The second tack would be the notion that we could just as easily construct a similar book, based on what is the established "known in quiz bowl circles". There's plenty of material that would be interesting to a wider audience, and could be just as eclectic as Schott's work is lauded for. Now, if that's too much work, it could be done in a smaller size... Hey, don't we compile interesting information into convenient packet size?
It's up to us to make the opportunities we are presented with count. This book's popularity is an opportunity, it is highlighting a group of people who could enjoy this game. We may not quite know how to reach them yet, but it's important to know they are out there.