The Battle Of The Knuckleheads

As a committed citizen of the self-help world, you are, let’s assume, fully conversant with The Rules. You’ve consumed the Chicken Soup books. And you’ve snapped up 10 Steps to a Great Relationship, even though you have 100 Best Ways to Stay Together on the shelf at home. So why would you possibly be interested in The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Being Faithful, a soon-to-be-published tome that manages to fill 352 pages explicating the proposition that cheating is unwise? (A section on terminating an affair is headed “A Happy Ending? Probably Not!”)

You must be some kind of idiot. Or maybe a dummy. But at least there are plenty like you. Just check out the proliferating titles from the two giants of the how-to publishing industry. The burgeoning For Dummies series, which began with instructional books on software, now has 373 titles, ranging from Buying a Car for Dummies to Sex for Dummies (by Dr. Ruth Westheimer). With 50 million copies in print in 38 languages, sales reached $120 million in 1997, up 23% from the year before–a robust enough growth curve to allow parent company IDG to complete a public stock offering this summer.

The Idiot’s Guide series, published by Macmillan, is still a distant second. But sales are expected to reach $28 million this year, more than double the figure for 1997. Its topics are more creative, from The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Beating the Blues to The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Being Psychic. For presidential-scandal lovers, Macmillan has commissioned a bankruptcy lawyer to write The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Starr Report. Author Steven D. Strauss says the book, which he is finishing up, will “explain a lot, like what impeachment means.”

After generations of how-to books, the Dummies and Idiot’s books seem to have caught on, thanks in part to the decade’s obsession with faux connoisseurship–the need to know enough about Tuscan cooking or single-malt Scotch to not be an embarrassment at parties. But the blunt titles, with a wink at the reader, are a comforting reassurance that no one who picks up these books need apologize for having to start from scratch. “Would we have been able to laugh at ourselves enough to pick a book with the word idiot in the title in any other era?” asks Lloyd Short, overseer of the Idiot’s series. “I don’t think so.”

Both series are targeted at time-challenged boomers, and both have similar formats, with short chapters, brief paragraphs, lots of sidebars–and few difficult words. “Every time we threw some fancy terminology in there,” says Ed McCarthy, co-author of Wine for Dummies, Red Wine for Dummies and White Wine for Dummies, “our editors made us take it out.”

All this is not to say that the books are models of brevity. No matter what the subject, each volume seems obliged to weigh in at a hefty 300-to-400 pages. The result is that Classical Music for Dummies is only a few pages longer than, say, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Dealing with Your In-Laws. The latter, like many of the data-lite books in both series, has plenty of filler. One whole chapter, called Crazy Quilt, reminds us that we live in a melting pot (because you never know whom you will end up marrying) and features statistics on how many Hmong are living in Wisconsin as well as a cultural-IQ quiz that begins, “Abdul, a young man from Egypt, fell in love with Italian-American Gina…”

The Dummies series was launched in 1991, when John Kilcullen, a former marketing executive at Bantam, published a book for computer neophytes called DOS for Dummies and quickly found the format to be infinitely adaptable. (The series now includes audio books and a board game, Trivial Pursuit for Dummies.) Macmillan launched the first of its Idiot’s series in 1994, and has tried hard to distinguish itself from its bigger rival. Gary Krebs, an editorial director at Macmillan, claims that the Dummies books are too “impersonal” as well as patronizing. “They’re already calling their readers dummies,” he says. “We are saying the process is complicated and this is a guide.” The Dummies folks tend to sniff at the Idiot’s more outlandish titles and freewheeling approach. But Kilcullen defends his series with the kind of delicacy he might have learned from, say, Public Relations for Dummies: “We have a greater commitment to the emotional dissonance a reader feels with a subject.”

The differences are less apparent to outsiders. Both series do best when they stick to subjects that require concrete instruction. Gourmet Cooking for Dummies, by renowned chef Charlie Trotter, for example, is a fine primer on everything from saucemaking to cabinet stocking. And both often seem superfluous when they venture into fuzzy life-style topics. Dating for Dummies and The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Dating, for instance, pile on love-yourself aphorisms as though the reader had never discussed relationships, picked up a woman’s magazine or watched anything on the Lifetime network.

Both advise working on political campaigns to meet people and keeping up with the news so you have lots to talk about on dates. But Dummies recommends People, while the Idiot’s Guide opts for USA Today. Surely you weren’t expecting The Economist.