Author Brian Solomon talks about his new book 'Pro Wrestling FAQ: All That's Left to Know About the World's Most Entertaining Spectacle'

Author Brian Solomon sat down with philly.com recently to talk about his new book, "Pro Wrestling FAQ: All That's Left to Know About the World's Most Entertaining Spectacle," which takes a look at history of professional wrestling from its humble beginnings in carnivals to the massive spectacle it is today.

Solomon is a former writer for WWE who also penned "WWE Legends" back in 2006 and has been involved with several wrestling-related projects since.

You can purchase "Pro Wrestling FAQ" wherever books are sold for $29.99. Here's the transcript from the interview:

Vaughn Johnson: What can you tell me about Pro Wrestling FAQ?

Brian Solomon: Well, it's sort of designed to be the be-all and end-all, one-volume wrestling reference book. Basically all that you need to know that I could fit between two covers and the time that they gave me to write it. It's the ultimate one-volume wrestling reference book.

Johnson: How were you approached about this project?

Solomon: Well, it's part of a series. The FAQ series is put out by Hal Leonard Books and they were thinking of doing a pro wrestling entry in the series. I happen to someone who freelanced as an editor for them. His name is Mike Edison and he was really instrumental. I got to know him just because of a show that we both took part in called "Kevin Geeks Out About Wrestling," which is a kind of a live clip show where we show clips from wrestling and we kind of make jokes and it's kind of a fun a show. Mike and I were both involved in the show so he got to know me that way.

When the people at Hal Leonard were saying, "Hey, we want to do a wrestling book," he instantly put them in touch with me and said, "This is the guy for your book." The interesting thing about though was that they originally wanted to be the WWE FAQ, but I kind of suggested that we broaden the scope a little bit and also to avoid intellectual property infringement if WWE kind of decided they wanted to make a stink over it.

Johnson: Did it seem like a tall task to you of being the guy to provide the FAQ of all of professional wrestling?

Solomon: I was actually lucky because I've been a fan and I've been kind of like an amateur historian interested in the history of the business for about 25 years now or more, so I have a lot of accumulated knowledge stuck in my head. I was lucky and what I mean by that was that I had a nice starting point. I didn't have to just start researching from scratch and finding everything out that I could find out. I had a pretty broad base of knowledge so the research then just became trying to verify or flesh out things that I already knew, which really helped to expedite the process of writing the book.

Johnson: How do you go about verifying a lot of information about pro wrestling? I've done my share of research about wrestling in Philadelphia and it's not easy to do.

Solomon: One thing that was important to me about it was talking to people who knew better than I did. This is something I feel not a lot of wrestling books do and I wanted to differentiate my book in that way. I picked the brains of a lot of really smart and really knowledgeable people … people who have kind of made it their life's work to really research this stuff. I talked to a lot of wrestling historians. Most notably, was Dave Meltzer who talked to me for about two hours and even agreed to write the preface to my book.

I talked to people like Mike Chapman, who is the world's leading authority on Frank Gotch and on pro wrestling from the early 20th century. Tim Hornbaker, who has written some incredible books about the history of wrestling, about the history of the National Wrestling Alliance. People like that helped me really kind of avoid a lot of the B.S. and really get down to the brass tacks of the truth of the history of the business and also their insight on the nature of the business was really, really useful.

I talked to some talent, too. In fact, speaking of Philadelphia, one of the people I talked to was the Blue Meanie, Brian Heffron, who talked to me at length. He gave me some great stuff about Paul Heyman and ECW. Philadelphia has a long wrestling history going way back before ECW, but it was great to get his point of view. He was one of the people I was really hoping to get to talk to.

Johnson: Like I said, getting documentation of pro wrestling is hard because like you put in your book, a lot of the promoters didn't keep records.

Solomon: It wasn't really in their interest to keep records. I mean, if you go back to maybe the 1930s when the business starts to get really fragmented, and starts to get regionalized, and the promoters really start to get protective and paranoid of each other, and they're not interested in having a knowledgeable fan base because they always just want you to care about the next big show. They don't want you to know that these two guys you're going to see wrestle next week have wrestled each other about 40 times before in the last 10 years. They don't want you to know things like that. That's why the history of the business hasn't really been that well preserved. Its there if you really want to look. It's just difficult.

I have looked through newspaper clippings. I used to, in the old pre-internet days, I used to spend time just literally going through microfilms of the New York Times trying to find old results and really get to the bottom of things. I would discover things I thought were true that were actually wrong; dates and title changes and things that have been altered by promoters for their own purposes, but it's all there. The University of Notre Dame has a vast archive of letters and photography and wrestling history, believe it or not, that was left to them by an old promoter who passes away. They have like a treasure trove of stuff there and I was able to make use of some of that stuff for the book.

Johnson: When you turn over your information and copy to your editors, how do they react to some of the stuff you turn in and the depth of the info you've gathered?

Solomon: The funny thing happened actually when I did my first book. When I did "WWE Legends," one of the questions I got asked by my editors at Simon and Schuster was, "Look, we need to know how to verify some of these facts and things you put in here. Where did you get this from and how do you know this?" There were times where I would just have to put my hands up and go, "Look, I just know. I don't know where to point you to. I know because I've been studying the business for 15 years and I know a lot of people and I just know. It's just in my brain."

I know that may not be the answer they were looking for. When I did the new book, it wasn't so much the historical stuff, it was a lot of the stylebook type of things that would drive them nuts sometimes because wrestling kind of has its own rules when it comes to spelling and punctuation and style. I know one thing that drove them nuts was with WrestleMania, every year it seems like the typography for WrestleMania is different. The way they have the numbers will be Roman one year and then they'll be Arabic numerals. Then it might be a Roman numeral and an Arabic numeral and there's just no rhyme or reason to it.

They came to me and they were like, "What the hell is this?" They thought I made a terrible mistake and I'm like, "Look, I used to be a copy editor there. How do you think it made me feel?" It used to drive us insane. There's no internal logic. I said, "Look, this is the WWE style. This is what they label each event so I think we should go along with what their style is." I had to convince them of some things like that.

Johnson: What has the reaction been from the wrestling business about the book?

Solomon: If you're talking about WWE specifically, I used to work there so I still have friends there and business associates, so the attitude is that the book is competition. They have their own books. It's not like there's any animosity or anything, but they weren't going to help me with it and I did kind of speak briefly or put feelers out about maybe getting some photography or whatever. It was made kind of clear to me, in a polite way, that they can't really help me to make this book because it's kind of seen as competition.

Outside of WWE, I've been really pleased at how well it's been received and how people feel about it. People like Tom Prichard have had nice things to say about it. [People like] Kevin Kelly and Blue Meanie. Steve Keirn came out and said something really complimentary about it. It seems so far that people are praising it so that makes me happy.

Johnson: When you went about writing the book, how did you balance the content between being an introduction to pro wrestling and providing more insight to fans that are already knowledgeable about the business?

Solomon: I was trying to do exactly what you're describing. I was trying to have it be a book that could be good for you if you're a fanatical fan who really follows it closely or if you are someone who is very casual. For example, there is some stuff in there that if you're a really die-hard fan, there will be something in there that you kind of know pretty well. I get into detail of how heels and faces work and the dynamic of a wrestling angle and how a match is put together, building a match and the psychology of a match and things like that to a person who has been watching it many, many years, that is a well-traveled road. But that's there for the people that are maybe just getting into or trying to understand what it is. But for the people that are very well-versed in it, I tried to dig into some of the specific historical stories of things and provide some details that they've may not even have never known before and even if they did, it's a great place to collect all of that information in one place. It's the kind of book that you can take it down off the shelf and it's got all of that information in one convenient volume.

Johnson: Everybody enjoys the more modern stuff, but I enjoyed the early beginnings of the book where you talk about the carnival days and the gambling aspect of the business, which drove it from sport to performance art.

Solomon: It was an interesting time. There are people who believe that it was always kind of staged and that it was always a set up. That's a very controversial topic of was it ever a real sport and if so, when did it change? Whether it was or it wasn't we don't really know, but what's clear is that around that time, around the 1920s is when it starts to turn into something that is clearly visibly to the eye not a competitive sport. If you read about the real old school guys like Gotch and [George] Hackenschmidt, even if their matches were set up, even if their finishes were known, the matches themselves if you were to be sitting there watching them, would most likely have looked like competitive wrestling. It probably would have almost looked like an amateur match.

That doesn't mean it still wasn't fixed, but in those days it was more like a fixed sport. It was kind of a dirty sport. What would happen later was that it just became an all-out show, which is very different. Part of that was the gambling. You get into some really hot water if you have a person gambling on something that is fixed. Part of the thinking was to discourage gambling by making it into something that was much more obviously entertainment instead of making your money from gambling; you're making your money from tickets.

Johnson: Especially back in those days when you had the mafia roaming around looking to get a score.

Solomon: There was definitely mob activity in wrestling and in professional sports in general in those days. The World Series in 1919 was fixed. People loved to fix sports and wrestling and boxing were very easy to fix because there were less people to get in on the fix. I mean, if you fix the 1919 World Series, you have to talk to the entire Chicago White Sox and get people on board. If you're fixing a boxing match, you have to talk to one guy.

They knew how to do business. That's the thing. They were doing business and everyone was making money, including the wrestlers themselves were making money from doing that.

Johnson: Have you heard from any non fans of wrestling about the book?

Solomon: I'm a school teacher now and that's kind of been my life after wrestling, so I have a lot of people now in my new kind of phase of life, whether they be teachers or even students, who have already said to me, "I never really knew there was this much to it." Everybody always says, "Yeah, when I was a kid in high school or whatever we used to watch it and I forgot about it." That's kind of what everybody says, but most people don't realize there's so much history to it and also so much substance to what it actually is.

Johnson: What do you hope people take away after reading the book?

Solomon: That's a big question. I really hope that people can come away from the book realizing that this is a legitimate form of American entertainment, and not to look down their noses at it. Yes, it's low brow and yes, there's a lot of aspects to it that are kind of dumb. It's also a great craft that these men and women perform and it deserves a lot of respect and it is endlessly fascinating. I hope that they can understand that. It's just like anything else.