Is it funny that when police searched the home of one of the men accused of the Hatton Garden heist, they found a copy of the book Forensics for Dummies? This article answers that question and more! Read on to become an expert on Dummies!
On one hand, this news is funny. Maybe any fool could pull off a heist just by dipping into a title billed as “a must for fans of CSI or Patricia Cornwell”. One minute you could be sitting there watching CSI reruns, the next boring a hole through a 50cm (20in) wall. On the other hand, it’s wrong to profit from or laugh at crime. So while you might expect the people behind the “For Dummies” books to have allowed themselves a small chuckle at the news, at the inadvertent way this discovery markets the books’ power to educate and inspire, in fact they haven’t laughed at all. “I wouldn’t say it’s a chuckle because it’s a pretty serious news subject,” says Raichelle Weller, the books’ associate marketing director in the UK. “If people choose to inform themselves, that’s their choice. We publish for a wide demographic.” (By “wide demographic”, she means “lots of different people”.)
Consider that this isn’t the first time the Dummies series has been in the news over the past 18 months. In July 2014, two men from Birmingham who had fought with an extremist group in Syria were revealed to have first visited Amazon and ordered The Koran for Dummies. Meanwhile, Julian Knight wrote British Politics for Dummies. Shortly afterwards, he became MP for Solihull. (Interesting fact! There is no mention of his Dummies authorship on his website.)
Let’s be clear about this. There is nothing pernicious about the For Dummies series – they have a bright, inoffensive yellow-and-black cover, and a cuteish character called Dummies Man who helps readers through complicated issues. But the books have incredible reach. They are a call to arms to get off the sofa and face down whatever challenge has tormented you, from sex to gardening with free-range chickens. That’s a potent invitation! Worldwide, there are more than 250m books in print covering 1,800 topics.
Since its conception in 1989, the series has been on a mission to “pop the pomposity of reference books”, Weller says. “The idea was that it was almost an anti-establishment book.” (The cover of the very first book, 1991’s DOS for Dummies, shows the title handwritten on a placard.) John Kilcullen, then president of IDG Books (which launched the series, before Wylie came on board), overheard a bewildered customer in a software shop asking for a DOS manual “for dummies”.
The series was born. Since then, Dummies books have become a recognisable cultural landmark. A specially commissioned Planes for Dummies appeared in the opening sequence of the Disney movie Planes. Hillary Clinton was reportedly given an Emails for Dummies book by prescient staff in 1997. Ark-building for Dummies featured in the film Evan Almighty. Emmerdale has recently put in a request to use one of the books.
“The important cue I was given was not to make things simple, but to make them accessible,” says one Dummies author who wishes to remain nameless. “Keep long words to a minimum. Where you used them, you had to stage them: ‘Now we’re going to be discussing gentrification. What’s gentrification?’”
The key to their success is that they never address the reader as an idiot. Apart from in the title.
