The hosts with the mosts

My son, whose hands are visible in this blog's picture of our dog, gave me a nice Christmas present. As you can probably guess from the image, the present was David Baber's compendium of factoids and comments on 32 game show hosts.

Although written in 2008 the book leans heavily toward the past. Don't bother looking for Meredith Vieira or Howie Mandel, for instance, even though both had established themselves as successful hosts by 2008. In fact, the book would make a nice present for the older-is-better crowd on the GSN Internet board. (I'm currently having one of my periodic spats with the crowd, by the way.)

I've only begun browsing through the book's gazillions of facts about the 32 hosts. There's no way I can vouch for the authenticity of every item because I just don't know enough about these gentlemen's careers. (And they are all men, it should be noted.) But Baber does a nice job of squeezing a ton of information into a few pages for each host.

There are plenty of photos in the book, albeit in black-and-white. I'll read through some of my favorite hosts first, like Bill Cullen and Garry Moore. Eventually I'll try to hit them all, right down to Dennis James and Jim Peck.