AMAZING BUT TRUE: STORIES ABOUT PEOPLE, PLACES, AND THINGS.

ByDoug Storer '21. New York: Pocket Books, ADivision of Simon and Schuster, Inc., 1973. 191PP. 95 cents.

This is not a Barnum and Bailey Side Show. It is a Doug Storer Side Show, 176 "stories," each one no more than a page and many less. Stories," indeed! Every one is "true." Bob Considine describes Doug as "an avid collector/gatherer who delights in the fun, and sometimes danger, of being a magpie of curiosities."

It would take an ordinary writer 500 pages to cover adequately the frailties of Winston Churchill and seven world famous figures. Storer needs only 30 lines, less than a page, to affirm that Churchill may be linked with other "towering 'failures,' " looked upon at one time as "only a cut above the village idiot": William Faulkner, Twain, Shaw, Einstein, Napoleon, Dickens and Michelangelo. Why? Churchill's low marks at Harrow.

American Presidents and the King of Albania can also be given the nutshell treatment. In the Civil War Colonel Hayes ordered his men back into the firing line without breakfast before sunrise. Acting on his own, Billy, the mess sergeant; passed out roast-beef sandwiches to them at their gun posts. Pleased, the colonel promoted on the spot the mess sergeant to lieutenant. The colonel was Rutherford B. Hayes, 19th President of the United States, and Billy, the Mess Sergeant, became William McKinley, our 25th.

Not all poor people die broke. In 1928 an old lady, hard up, asked a London auctioneer if he would be interested in an old illustrated manuscript, written and given her when she was a little girl. Southby's sold it to Dr. A. S. Rosenbach for $77,000. It was Alice in Wonderland. Placed on a Virginia love letter in 1847, the "Blue Boy Stamp" first sold at $3000, now fetches $30,000. In 1876 a little Chinese boy ran away from his Boston uncle and served at sea as a cabin boy. The ship's captain taught him English and gave him his name, Charley Jones. A Methodist minister educated him further. Graduating from college he returned to China and as Charley Jones Soong he founded the most powerful family in China: father of T. V. Soong, once Premier of China; of Madame Sun Yat Sen, wife of China's liberator; and of Madame Chiang Kai-shek. But John Howard Payne, who wrote "Home Sweet Home," never had a home of his own and died broke.

It has a tail like a beaver, a bill like a duck, inner organs like a reptile, is warm blooded, lays eggs, and has poison sacs on its hind legs. Hatched babies measure only a half inch, cling to the mother's skin, and feed on milk oozing out of her chest. It is the Australian platypus.

If you are choking under such ingurgitation, you are no stoic. Doug Storer will tell you about the real man who coughed up a real bullet that had been lodged in his neck for 24 honest-to-God years.