The Memory Artist
Daniel Tammet

Alfred Hitchcock’s classic The 39 Steps immortalized him as the filmmaker’s best-loved character. But the story of the real-life ‘Mr Memory’, William John Bottell (1875-1956), is stranger and more extraordinary than fiction, a beautiful mind who overcame considerable odds on his rise to stardom and a career that spanned continents and half a century, from the age of almanacs to the dawn of our computer era, during which he elevated remembering to an art form.  The Memory Artist vividly narrates the life and times of a man who, like Borges’s Funes The Memorious, could recall everything he read and heard. Written by an author who himself lives with hypermnesia, this work of creative nonfiction will draw on years-long historical research and never-before-seen personal archives to shed new light on the lived experience of exceptional memory and reverse the erasure of a pioneering neurodivergent figure who was once as famous as his contemporary Houdini.  Performing under the stage name ‘Datas’, Bottell stunned audiences the world over with his ability to instantly answer any question hurled at him. He embodied the new age of ‘data’ (which began at the end of the nineteenth century), prefiguring the arrival of digital machines and the artificial intelligence revolution we are all living in today. He was the world’s first search engine, a human ChatGPT, suggesting that AI has intriguing links with neurodivergent cognition.  Setting Bottell’s life and mind in a broader perspective for readers, the book will intersperse biographical scenes with chapters on the history and science of memory from antiquity to the present day. It will pull readers into an inner life unlike any other, revealing how Bottell’s astonishing mind worked, while telling the larger story of memory, from monks and Mark Twain to autistic savants and synesthetic number lines.