(FORTUNE Magazine) – Washingtonians look forward to November with eager anticipation, and not merely because it brings the national elections. November is the month when the new yearly edition of Statistical Abstract of the United States comes out!

Perhaps you're not as excited as we are. The Stat Ab is the ultimate inside-the-Beltway bathroom book, perfect for casual browsing in unhurried moments. This may strike other Americans--those who outfit their bathroom libraries with, say, a few well-worn back issues of People magazine--as unlikely, but then so much about Washington is unlikely. (Have you heard about our mayor?) The Stat Ab is expensive: $40 in paperback, the price of more than a dozen issues of People. Its publisher, the Census Bureau, is not generally known for its chart-topping blockbusters. It contains no pictures of Mariah Carey in cutoffs. And it is a large thing, an unwieldy slab of pulp weighing in at 1,000-plus pages. (Appropriate for a bathroom book: You have to read it sitting down.)

But of course it's large: Like a bearded, homoerotically charged transcendentalist poet, it contains multitudes--but multitudes of, in this case, statistics, table after table of them, more than 1,500 tables in all. As the preface puts it, the Stat Ab "is the standard summary of statistics on the social, political, and economic organization of the United States." It is, in other words, about everything. Each table is a little jewel box of data. Start picking through it, and you don't know what you'll find or when you'll stop.

The Stat Ab offers above all the pleasures of serendipity. For instance: I pick up my copy (unh!), flip it open at random, and find table No. 407 (in the 1995 edition): Book Purchasing by Adults, 1991 and 1993. My eye wanders down the columns of numbers and rests on an interesting discovery: Poor people buy more books than rich people. To be precise (the Stat Ab is always precise), people with household incomes below $30,000 bought 37.1% of all books sold in 1991; people with incomes above $60,000 bought 24.7%.

Now, as paranoid Texas billionaires like to say, I find that fascinatin'. How to explain it? Probably because there are fewer $60,000-plus households than there are those under $30,000. To test my theory I turn to the index, and before I can find the table on distribution of income by household, my eye catches on--Nuts: consumption. Who could resist? Household income has to wait while I check out table 225: Per Capita Consumption of Major Food Commodities. I quickly discover, not to my surprise, that consumption of red meat has declined from 132 pounds per capita in 1970 to 112 pounds in 1993. If you control for Kate Moss and people who want to look like Kate Moss, this is still a hefty intake of the good stuff, and I am pleased. But then, sliding down the column, I see that consumption of skim milk has more than doubled in 23 years; ditto yogurt and low-cal sweeteners. Without planning to, I have collected evidence to support a favorite thesis of mine: America is getting wimpier. But I won't have conclusive proof until I compare the average consumption of real beer with light beer, so I turn back to the index ...

But I digress. Digression, in fact, is the point. The Stat Ab is like a great museum, a place for wandering and surprises. It may seem odd to confess undying affection for a book that contains so much bad news. And the Stat Ab is loaded with bad news. The section called Vital Statistics opens with a particularly gloomy series of tables. No. 87 shows the steady advance of divorce, a tripling since 1950. No. 88 yields the stark, and by now familiar, datum that almost one in three births in the U.S. is to an unwed mother.

There's lots of good news, too, of course. No. 87 also shows the steady decline in infant mortality, for example; the rate has been cut by two-thirds in the past 40 years. But there's something else about the Stat Ab that makes it a sunny and appealing book. Demographer friends tell me that our Stat Ab is--forgive the jingoism--simply the best in the world. The government of every industrialized nation publishes something similar to our abstract. But none is so complete, so reliable, so exhaustive, so up-to-date, as ours.

Taken in its entirety, the Stat Ab is evidence, indeed proof, of another favorite thesis, one no single statistic alone can capture: The U.S. is the most open and self-consciously honest society there is, a country with nothing to hide, enlivened by people of infinite curiosity and blessed with the resources to satisfy them. These happy truths about America almost make up for its steady wimpification. So go out and buy the new 1996 Stat Ab--scheduled to go on sale November 19--and hoist it above your head, pump it up and down, and repeat after me: "We're No. 1!" Now drop it, or you'll get a hernia.