- - - - - - - - - - T A B L E__T A L K Do you believe that the news you get is accurate? Discuss it in the Media section of Table Talk. - - - - - - - - - - R E C E N T L Y Popcorn is served By James Surowiecki Reserved seating is returning to movie theaters -- possibly ruining the last elbow-rubbing bastion of cultural democracy (12/01/97) Pundits shriek: Bring us Saddam's head By Eric Alterman Clinton's agreement with Saddam disappoints war-mongering pundits (11/26/97) Going for gold! By Inda Schaenen Women's sports magazines duel over a hot and growing target demographic (11/25/97) The Washington Post in decline By Harry Jaffe Newsroom bureaucrats suck life out of Washington Post (11/24/97) Hollywoodland By Catherine Seipp Hollywoodland for sale: O.J. house on the market (11/21/97) - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE MEDIA CIRCUS ARCHIVES

THE MAN WHO WROTE THE CENTURY - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - At home with Eddie Ellis, the greatest diarist of all time BY LAURA JOHNSTON | Walking up the steps to the home of the world's most prolific diarist, I feel a little self-conscious. Small things -- the spot of mustard on my shirt, the entire shirt, everything I chose to wear that day -- begin to feel like awful mistakes. I'm going to be his material for the day. No matter what happens during my visit, I know I will literally go down in history. The Guinness Book of World Records has declared the diary of Edward Robb Ellis to be the largest ever. He has kept his diary for 70 years, filling 42,000 pages with 21 million words. The 87-year-old Ellis has blown away a field of the greatest diarists ever -- André Gide, Kafu Nagai, Thomas Mann, even Samuel Pepys, whose output of 1.25 million words in nine years (1660-69) looks like a bad case of writer's block by comparison. (By way of context: Since an average novel runs about 100,000 words, Ellis' feat is akin to writing 210 novels -- around the combined output of Dickens, Kipling and Balzac, with the works of Proust, Joyce Carol Oates and portions of David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest" tossed in for good measure.) A lifelong newspaperman, Ellis lives in a four-room brownstone apartment on a leafy street in the Chelsea district of Manhattan. Fifteen thousand books are shelved floor to ceiling, each one annotated with exclamation marks, underlined in red marker and stuffed with news clippings. There are scores of encyclopedias, the complete works of Carl Jung and sections devoted to mysticism and New York City. Ellis turns on a desk lamp to see me better and politely offers coffee, juice, doughnuts. I accept the offer and absorb the delightful disarray of heavy Victorian furniture, caricatures drawn by Ellis, framed articles about his diary and a bust of his late wife, Ruth, the only woman he ever truly loved. Notes drift about on the dusty floor, and I glimpse volumes of his famous diary that sit, enticingly, in an adjoining room. Ellis looks like a Bohemian Santa Claus, with a long white beard, red felt beret, green pocket T-shirt and cowboy boots. He is full of Welsh charm, eyes twinkling behind the thick dark rims of his glasses. But before I can ask him a single question, Ellis has asked me three of his own. Soon I'm happily describing my life and times. Emphysema bothers him, but he's too busy taking down the details of my life to get hung up on his lungs. The next morning, Ellis will spin the notes into a diary entry on his Hermes manual typewriter, and I will become part of the longest story ever told. N E X T+P A G E+| But enough about me - - - - - - - - - - PHOTO BY CARMEN QUESADA