Not a statistician, Huff was a journalist who wrote many how-to articles as a freelancer.

In the 1960s and 1970s, it became a standard textbook introduction to the subject of statistics for many college students.

It has become one of the best-selling statistics books in history, with over one and a half million copies sold in the English-language edition.

Themes of the book include "Correlation does not imply causation" and "Using random sampling."

In a UK edition, Geis' illustrations were replaced by cartoons by Mel Calman.