A seismic shift

Simon WINCHESTER is watching Simon Winchester on TV. The bestselling author of “The Professor and the Madman” is spending three months here researching a book about the 1906 earthquake and fire that leveled the city. Two local filmmakers have been following him around, which sounds somewhat less interesting than spending a day watching a seismograph needle. Making a nonfiction book, after all, usually involves endless days alone in a library and at a computer.

But the documentary snippet playing in Winchester’s living room in a high-rise apartment is surprisingly interesting, perhaps because Winchester himself seems to find everything around him so fascinating. He marvels over a huge, wall-sized map at a U.S. Geological Survey office; he ogles a local historian’s quake memorabilia collection; he hikes to the start of the San Andreas Fault on a bluff in Humboldt County and makes a joke about the “for sale” sign on the crumbling edge of the continent.

“The film sounds terribly incestuous but it’s actually a good idea to show how a book gets written,” the Englishman says over tea.

Winchester is 60, nearly bald and dressed like a professor in a sweater and slacks (his bright red socks the only hint of color about him), yet he exudes a boyish enthusiasm for collecting and displaying facts like a kid with a rock collection. In fact, Winchester’s first, brief, career was as a geologist, training put to good use in his last book, “Krakatoa” (HarperCollins), an entertaining and scientifically scrupulous examination of the most catastrophic eruption in recorded history.

As Winchester was packing away research material from that book, he noticed that the Indonesian volcano’s explosion was often lumped together with other great natural disasters such as the 1906 earthquake ... almost exactly a century ago. He immediately called his publisher to point out the looming anniversary. And then, fortuitously, San Jose State University called to offer Winchester a visiting professorship (he’s teaching creative nonfiction and the literature of empire).

So earlier this year, Winchester drove out from his farm in the Berkshires to California. His temporary apartment, with a stunning view of the city and bay, is dominated by the tools of his trade: three big geological maps of California hang on the walls, a large dining table is buried under century-old newspaper clippings and magazines, a bike that he’s been riding around the city to get the feel of the landscape leans against a wall.

Winchester’s curiosity is such that he’s planning research trips to Alaska and Chile, each of which also suffered major earthquakes in 1906.

Was there any relation to the San Francisco quake? Not really, he admits. He just likes to travel.

“There’s tons of material, some 3,000 books have been written on the earthquake already,” Winchester notes in his disarmingly modest manner. “What have I got to add? The thought of writing it is frankly intimidating. I would like the book to be authoritative.”

What he’ll bring to the project is his broader view. He says his book won’t just be about the quake but will range widely, covering the invention of seismography as a science, the psychological ramifications of the event on Californians -- including the upswing in religious fundamentalism -- and even the rivalry between Los Angeles and San Francisco for primacy as the state’s first city.

As in his volcano book, the disaster itself will probably take place in the middle of the story with a long buildup about how quakes happen and an equally eventful aftermath mixing personality, science and history.

It sounds promising; after all, this is the author who turned seemingly far less interesting subjects into huge bestsellers before. Winchester has written two books about a dictionary and one about a map -- and sold the movie rights for one of the unlikely successes (“The Professor and the Madman”) to Hollywood’s man of the moment, Mel Gibson.

“These were subjects that I found interesting,” Winchester says. “Blow me down, the public found these interesting too. I’m going to continue with this and if I become fascinated with something the public isn’t interested in, so be it. I’ll just be back at square one.” Then again, he notes, “I don’t want to become a disaster junkie.”

Winchester was born in Britain and after boarding school took a year off before starting Oxford. First he worked in a mortuary to save money, then he spent six months hitchhiking around North America, Montreal to Mexico City, spending just $18. “Amazing,” he recalls. “People were so kind. I just adore this country. I love the geology of America.”

At Oxford, Winchester studied geology, spent a summer on an expedition in Greenland, taking core samples and shooting polar bears for food. He graduated in 1966 and wound up working as a geologist for an oil company in Uganda, but it wasn’t long before he realized that he had made a poor career choice.

“I was an extremely bad, incompetent geologist,” he says. “I just wasn’t good at it.”

Winchester turned to journalism and, after a stint at a small paper in Newcastle, he became the North England correspondent for the well-respected Guardian. One day, he was sent to fill in for the reporter covering Belfast just before the IRA uprising that convulsed Northern Ireland. Overnight, he was a war correspondent. He stayed three years, winning awards and writing his first book, “In Holy Terror.”

“It made my career,” Winchester says, “riding on the back of tragedy.”

Winchester was later posted to Washington, then New Delhi and New York. He moved to the London Sunday Times as a roving foreign correspondent for several years and wound up back at the Guardian, based in Hong Kong.

Then there was what Winchester calls “the hiatus” when he was arrested by the Argentine government as a spy during the Falklands War and spent three months in jail, the subject of his tome “Prison Diary.” “No experience is wasted,” he says.

In 1995, Winchester started freelancing and writing books full time. He got good reviews but sales were slight. He hosted a TV series about Hong Kong but the director died after three installments and the project was canceled. A magazine he wrote for folded.

“A number of things conspired to make me worry about my career,” he says. “Directors dying, magazines going belly up. I was slightly worried about the freelance life, that I was going to slide into a middle age of extreme penury.”

Then, in 1998, came “The Professor and the Madman,” which was originally turned down by Winchester’s then-publisher but picked up by another house. The book told the story of an American Civil War veteran locked up in a British asylum for the criminally insane who devotes his time to the epic project to create the Oxford English Dictionary. (San Jose State has launched an essay contest in Winchester’s honor on the topic “The Joy of English,” first prize for which is the 20-volume set of the OED.)

A glowing feature on Winchester ran in the New York Times when the book came out and that night it shot to No. 1 on Amazon.com. The book was on the bestseller list for 35 weeks in hardcover and 58 in paperback and has sold more than a million copies around the world.

“It completely changed my life,” Winchester says.

He bought a flat in New York’s West Village and a 75-acre farm in the Berkshires, his main residence (he also keeps a cottage in Scotland). He has been married and divorced twice and has three grown sons living in London.

He later wrote a second book about the making of the OED, “The Meaning of Everything,” which was followed by “The Map That Changed the World,” about the birth of modern geology. Last year came “Krakatoa,” which the New York Times hailed as “one of the best books ever written about the history and significance of a natural disaster.”

“Its behavior on the bestseller list was a bit volcanic: It rose very swiftly to No. 2 and then just as swiftly went down immediately,” Winchester says. “I never would have had this kind of conversation 10 years ago. None of my books would have had the faintest whiff of bestsellerdom.”

Once he turns in the manuscript for the earthquake tome (working title, “Suddenly, Without Warning”) in December, Winchester will start on another book that doesn’t exactly scream bestseller: a biography of Evariste Galois, a French mathematician who died at the age of 21 in 1832.

Winchester sits down at his computer and Googles Galois, which finds 74,200 hits. The first entry offers this explanation of his contribution to abstract algebra: “To study solvability by radicals of a polynomial equation f(x) = 0, we let K be the field generated by the coefficients of f(x), and let F be a splitting field for f(x) over K. Galois considered permutations of the roots that leave the coefficient field fixed.”

Winchester’s genial features narrow to a frown.

“It could be that his mathematics are so abstruse and his story so obscure that no one will buy it,” he says. “But it’s an extremely good story, involving murder and death. I hope I’ll be able to tell it in such a way as to say, ‘It may look a boring story but it’s not.’ How long I’ll be able to keep that sort of thing going I don’t know.”

*

Simon Winchester in discussion

Where: Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, UCLA campus

When: 3 p.m. today at Korn Convocation Hall

Topic: Does History Have a Moral?

Price: Free