In 2004, Ken Jennings redefined success on Jeopardy!, banking over $2,500,000 as he won 74 games. Those of us who get paid in bar credit know it's hard to make a living through trivia, but Jennings has done it. He turned his obligatory cash-in-on-your-15-minutes book, Brainiac, into something much better and broader, an examination of trivia history and culture.

He also moved from Utah to the Seattle area. That, and Brainiac's paperback release tomorrow, gave us the perfect excuse to interview the friendliest face for dilettantish smarts since George Plimpton.

Although Brainiac discusses your run on Jeopardy!, you build on that to investigate trivia culture, past and present. Would you have written some version of this book if you hadn't gone on the show, or if you hadn't done so exceptionally well?

Never in a million years. I had definitely been one of those archetypal trivia kids, with closets full of notebooks of dumb lists and an annoying oddball fact for every occasion. But sometime during adolescence, I realized that people don't really like trivia know-it-alls much. It sure isn't a hit with girls to know all the presidents' middle names, you know? So I sort of went in the trivia closet for twenty years, still knowing plenty of useless stuff, but trying not to bother anybody else with my problem. A "live and let live" thing. Then Jeopardy! happened, and suddenly, without meaning to be, I'm the poster boy for a certain kind of nerd. Outed by Alex Trebek! So instead of being vaguely embarrassed by trivia, I got to return to my nerdy roots and write a bestseller about it. Obsession is destiny, I guess.

What did you tell the Jeopardy! recruiters you'd do with any money you won, and have you actually done it?

I think I said I wanted to use the money to travel--or at least, this is the safe answer suggested in Mike Dupee's book How to Get on Jeopardy!...and Win! which was my bible for most of 2003-04. Coincidentally, that was also what I planned to do with any "winnings," should there be any (I privately suspected I would lose my first game). My wife and I both grew up overseas--she's lived in France, I lived in Spain--and we wanted to show each other around Europe. We did finally go, but the trip was pushed back about a year when my Jeopardy! experience went from being a one-day lark to a summer job/new career.

Will Brainiac's paperback edition have new content to strike envy in the hearts of people who bought the hardcover?

Don't you hate it when authors do that? I'm looking at you, Dave Eggers. For a while, I was considering adding a chapter about international quiz tournaments. The book is very America-centric, and I'm only just starting to catch on to how popular trivia is in other places--Belgium, for example. And Sri Lanka. So a chapter on international trivia would be a fun way to broaden the book a little for paperback readers...but I finally decided against it, so as not to leave the hardcover readers feeling screwed. Some egregious typos and factual errors are fixed in the paperback, though. On page 78, Edward IV of England is now Edward VI of England. I know everyone was on the edge of their seats waiting to see if that one would be corrected.

You spend a little of Brainiac worrying that your son Dylan is going to grow up and become an übernerd. Is that still a concern?

From what we can tell, he's still a pretty quick kid with a good memory, prone to obsessive interests, but he's also inherited his dad's laziness: he can read just fine, for example, but usually quits from boredom/exhaustion after just a few sentences. Maybe all the lead paint on those Thomas the Tank Engine trains he likes to chew on has dulled his superpowers. So maybe he'll be sitting at the slacker table in the cafeteria instead of the nerd one after all.

According to LibraryThing, people who own Brainiac are unusually unlikely to own Wizard and Glass, His Dark Materials, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and Where the Wild Things Are. Any insight about why fans of Stephen King, Philip Pullman, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Maurice Sendak are avoiding your book?

That's funny, that's exactly how I pitched Brainiac to Random House. "It's the opposite of Thus Spoke Zarathustra meets the anti-Where the Wild Things Are!" They bought it sight unseen.

You're not listed as one of McLeod House's Seattle Notables. Are you sorry that you're not stalked with the same fervor as Bill Nye, Squatch, or Artis the Spoonman?

I usually manage to keep a pretty low profile in Seattle and that's fine by me. It frees up my day for other projects, like stalking Kenny G around Mercer Island.

How is Seattle like Salt Lake City?

Uh, two cities that have both contained my kitchen? They both have a great light rail system except Seattle? I give up. Much as I miss Utah and our family and friends there, I was born and bred in the Northwest and never really felt at home living anyplace else. I missed the water and the trees. I couldn't get used to the deprivation of having just one lone coffee place at every intersection, rather than three or four. We didn't want our kids to grow up without knowing what slugs and mildew were.

Your next book, a trivia almanac coming out in December, contains 7,777 questions. (Though Amazon thinks there might be 8,888.) [Editor's note: when we first asked this question, the cover art on Amazon showed 7,777. Now? 8,888. Also, January availability date.] Are you done writing questions for a while, or are you still experiencing the world through a trivia-fodder lens?

Amazon knows all! The book's new subtitle reveals that it does indeed contain 8,888 questions. (Well upward of nine thousand, actually, but "8,888" sounds cooler on a cover.) I think this makes it the biggest bowl of trivia goodness ever served up in this country. I initially proposed the book thinking it would be a fun and easy way to clear out of my system all the trivia I'd accumulated while writing Brainiac. A trivia enema, if you will. But nine thousand questions later, it started to feel a little more like aversion therapy. I love trivia, but I'm looking forward to writing about something else--anything else--next time.

What kind of bribe would it take for a local trivia team to get you to play for them as a ringer?

Heh. I have a few friends who play pub trivia around here sometimes, and when they talk about their teams, I do miss the competition a little. A little tingle in my Jeopardy! buzzer thumb, like a retired ballplayer might feel in his glove hand. But I don't know if I'd be that comfortable with all the pressure should anyone recognize me--I get trivia questions wrong all the time, of course, just like everybody else.

Why, how much are you offering?