The Encyclopaedia of Everything Else

Most encyclopaedias are boring. They are so packed with worthy but dull facts that a great deal of weird and wonderful material is squeezed out. The Encyclopaedia of Everything Else takes the opposite approach and leaves out all the dreary stuff you can find elsewhere. The result is the most fascinating, astonishing, varied and utterly useless collection of information ever assembled and organized between two covers. From aardvark tooth bracelets to the genus of tropical weevils known as Zyzzyva, via Mark Twain's views about cabbages, this is a quarter of a million words of sublime pointlessness.

William Hartston is a Cambridge-educated mathematician and an international chess master. He writes the off-beat Beachcomber column for the Daily Express and is the author of several books on chess, numbers, humor and trivia, including Sloths and The Things That Nobody Knows.