Political Almanac

Never underestimate the American appetite for facts.

When it was first conceived in 1970, The Almanac of American Politics was to have been a brief statistical study of a few congressional districts where antiwar candidates stood a chance of winning. By last summer it had grown to 1,030 pages, containing statistics and informal, readable political summaries of every state and congressional district in the union that had never been available before in one package.

The Almanac's authors first met in the mid-1960s as fellow staffers on the Harvard Crimson. Michael Barone, 27, a Democrat who is now a lawyer in Detroit, has been a demographics adept since he was seven. "I can still remember the excitement of coming across the census figures for 1940 and 1950," he says. "It was like nothing else existed." His collaborators: Douglas Matthews, 27, a liberal Republican who is now studying law at Harvard, and Grant Ujifusa, 29, a political independent and third-generation Japanese American, who is now taking a Ph.D. in American civilization at Brown.

Publishing companies showed little interest until Ujifusa got the attention of an obscure Boston house called Gambit, Inc., which dropped its spring book list to get the Almanac published. It has become a word-of-mouth bestseller already. In the six weeks before publication date (Feb. 24), 25,000 copies in hard-cover ($12.95) and paperback ($4.95) have already been sold. Apparently there is an audience for political specifics that run the gamut from a district-by-district breakdown of federal spending to a concise catalogue of the nation's top 50 defense contractors and their yearly earnings from the Government.

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