I’ve long sought to be a student of Rhode Island trivia, but I’ve missed a big one.

We won the first World Series.

It was held in 1884, between the National League and the American Association, pitting the Providence Grays against the New York Mets. The Grays won in a best of three.

I know this because of a new book called Rhode Island Curiosities, published last month by Globe Pequot Press.

If an outlander from Chicago or L.A. heard of this title, they’d probably joke about it being 12 pages long. In fact, it’s almost 300. It’s authored by Seth Brown, who grew up in East Greenwich, graduated from Williams and may well have produced the biggest compilation of state quirks ever.

It has always amused me how many there are in a state so small it would only qualify as a ranch elsewhere. But somehow, the culture here has developed a richer texture than in states 10 times the size, such as Wisconsin, where all they have is cheese. Or Ohio, where all they have is . . . I’ll get back to you.

I spent yesterday leafing through the book and learned things I didn’t know.

Such as that the first British casualty in the Revolution, at least technically, was courtesy of a Rhode Island musket ball. In 1772, disgruntled Colonists stormed the British tax ship Gaspee, then anchored off Warwick. When Lieutenant Dudington resisted, one of the local taxpayers, Joseph Bucklin, dispatched him with a round. The book tells me the British did not get far tracking down the raiders because no one talked. This seemed to start a tradition that continued in places like Federal Hill when the mob was headquartered there. Hit man? I didn’t see any hit man. And taxpayers continue to be disgruntled, so it’s nice to see our ancestral attitudes live on.

Remember Love-22? A 1961 URI graduate, his given name was Lawrence Wagner, but he changed it legally, and handed out $22 bills during his various campaigns for political office. Author Seth Brown learned that like a true Rhode Islander, he is now living in Florida.

I knew that the hurricanes of 1938 and 1956 had turned downtown Providence into an early version of post-Katrina New Orleans, with 6-plus feet of standing water in some spots. I hadn’t known that one reason people were particularly shocked is there hadn’t been a previous big hurricane hitting Rhode Island since 1815.

This one will date me, but I hadn’t realized that Paladin, the hero of the 1960s cowboy show Have Gun, Will Travel, was based on a real Providence character named Victor DeCosta, who dressed in black and handed out cards with the image of a chess piece.

Nor had I known that after taking office, Attorney General Patrick Lynch put a bronze plaque on the AG building with a quote that he found inspiring: “With great power comes great responsibility.” It was taken from an unlikely source of America’s literary heritage: Spider-man.

I also didn’t know there was a place in Rhode Island called Chocolateville, because a mill there made chocolate until the 1920s. The city is now called Central Falls.

Whenever I’ve come across a reference to it, I’ve wondered what the deal is with the state rock, Cumberlandite. It’s mix of iron ore and other sediments was created by some long-ago volcano. Rhode Island Curiosities tells me it used to be called Rhodose because it’s unique to the state. Then it was found to be unique to Cumberland, so they changed the name to reflect that it’s nowhere else on earth but there.

I finally understand Seabees, symbolized by the statue of a bee carrying a machine gun in one hand and wrenches and hammers in the other outside the Naval base in North Kingstown. Before World War II, civilians were sent to do construction projects for the military overseas, but since new bases in the Pacific were being built under Japanese threat after beach-landings, it was decided the workers should have guns. The symbol was originally going to be a beaver, but since the group was called the Construction Battalion, its initials gave a different idea.

And somehow, I’d missed — or forgotten — that baseball’s longest game had a two-month delay between innings. It’s legendary by now that on April 23, 1981, the Pawtucket Red Sox notched the record for playing a 33 inning game at McCoy that was stopped after eight hours at 4:07 a.m. Nineteen fans were left watching. It remained a 2-2 tie. The visiting Rochester Red Wings went home. At last, after eight weeks, the game resumed on June 23 when the Red Wings returned to town. After 18 minutes, the Pawsox pushed in a run and won.

That’s a fraction of what’s in the book, which is in most bookstores now. My only disappointment is that the author learned what many have long said — that despite rumors, the old Industrial Bank building downtown, now the Bank of America building, was not the model for the Daily Planet in Superman, the one he was able to leap in a single bound.

I’m sorry, but I refuse to believe that.

I await the next edition of Curiosities to dig deeper and prove that it was.

mpatinkin@projo.com