What’s taller: a stack of books or the 72-year-old man who wrote them?

Jim Whiting believes he’s Washington’s most prolific author, having published some 170 titles of children’s nonfiction and edited 500 others. He’s queried librarian friends about his claim and thus far has met no contenders.

But his biggest ambition is not shelf space so much as stature: He’d like his pile to exceed his 5-foot-7 frame.

“It’s one of the few times I’ve actually been happy that I’m short,” jokes the longtime editor of Northwest Runner. With just a foot or two to go, he expects to hit his goal soon, maybe after his 30-book series on NBA teams comes out.

Whiting’s titles literally run the gamut from A(ntartica) to Z(oology), but his favorite subject is World War II. He’s read at least 20 books on Pearl Harbor alone, so the children’s book basically wrote itself.

“The Holocaust” was a harder topic to broach with just 40 pages of text.

“I had to strike a balance between conveying horror and inhumanity and becoming too graphic for 10-year-olds,” he said.

Another challenge for Whiting is word choice. When he’s writing for a specific reading level, he has to be careful with language.

For example, kindergarteners get “walk;” fifth-graders, “stroll”; and sixth-graders, “saunter.” Fortunately, there’s a guide he can consult that matches vocabulary with grade levels. There are also mathematical formulas. In adage form: Bigger words require shorter sentences.

Some words are bigger than you’d expect. Like love, Whiting explained. “When I was doing this first set of books, they had lists of words you could use that don’t count against the big word category and ‘love’ was conspicuous in its absence,” he said.

Whiting doesn’t get to pick his topics, though he can turn them down.

“Of course, the choice is obvious: If I say yes, I get paid. If I say no, I don’t,” he explained. “People look at J.K. Rowling and think, ‘Oh man, kids writers are rolling in dough,’ which they aren’t.”

The only assignment he’s ever rejected was a book on driver’s training in Florida. He was busy and the pay was lousy; spoiled oranges meets check engine light.

But most of the time, Whiting says yes and pushes himself to “own the book.”

Which is how he discovered his affinity for Snoop Dogg.

Before Whiting started researching “The Story of No Limit Records,” he was skeptical.

“I don’t like hip hop. I don’t like the guys that do hip hop. I love classical music,” he explained.

But as he dug into the label, he found common ground at the hoop.

No Limit’s founder, Percy Robert Miller, was a budding basketball star before he blew out his knee. Whiting, a total sports junkie, loved that story.

Miller never gave up on his athletic ambitions and at 31, nearly made the Toronto Raptors. He started the record store, which eventually became a $250 million business empire, with $10,000 he inherited from a malpractice settlement. (Whiting recalls these facts like he wrote the book yesterday — and not in 2012.)

It gets better. One of the guys on Miller’s label was Snoop Dogg.

“And to me, based only at looking at newspapers, Snoop was the epitome of everything I hated about rap music,” Whiting said. “I thought he was a worthless thug.”

Research proved him wrong. He found out that Snoop Dogg so valued his time playing high school football that he started an inner-city youth league. “He paid for everything,” Whiting gushed.

But that’s not the cherry on the “Snoop Dogg sundae,” as Whiting calls it.

That would be the Snooperbowl.

“Every year, he flies a team of his all stars to the host city of the Superbowl,” Whiting said. “For these kids, it’s probably the first time they’ve been on an airplane, first time they’ve been out of L.A. So the day before the Superbowl, his all stars play a team of all stars from the host city.”

All that philanthropy resonated with Whiting, who is also the founder and head coach of Bainbridge Blazers, one of the largest middle school running programs in the state. He related to Snoop’s cause, and his disdain came crashing down.

“I really have done a 180,” he said. “Every time now I read something about Snoop, I think what a great guy this is. I love what he does.”