The Compendium of (Not Quite) Everything

I loved it. Jonn Elledge is a charming and outstandingly nerdish guide. A big, generous, fascinating book, best dipped into on a rainy Sunday with the snooker on in the background. * Robert Webb *I love Jonn Elledge’s brain, and his tireless quests to boggle everyone else’s. I strongly suggest you hitchhike a ride with this book, which is a travelogue of the weird and wonderful, a galaxy of things in our world and beyond that I simply didn’t have a clue about. I am now slightly less clueless, much more entertained, and I briefly understood the Beaufort Scale. That alone causes me to break out the adjective “indispensable”. * Marina Hyde *A hyper-nerdy, tightly written masterpiece … It sucks you in like a fucking tar pit. * Ian Martin, writer of The Thick of It and Veep *It sounds like a mess until you realise it’s actually the world that is a mess and this fascinating, funny book is the only fixed point of sanity we’ve got. * Hugo Rifkind *An unholy cross between Douglas Adams and Bill Bryson, this compendium of strange, funny and surprising facts is the perfect loo book. * Helen Lewis *If you ever wondered what a parsec was, or how language developed, or how many wars have been fought over cows, or whether a large straw goat has ever been held in a secret location by Swedish police, I heartily recommend this book. Elledge’s natural curiosity has been brilliantly harnessed, answering questions you didn’t know you had with more clarity and wit than is fair for any single writer to contain. * Linda Tirado *Consistently both entertaining and fascinating. Jonn has explored a lifetime’s worth of 2am Wikipedia holes so that you don’t have to. * Ahir Shah *Joyous, mind-expanding, laugh-out-loud funny, and full of nerdy gusto. * Ian Dunt *Open this book at any page and you will learn new things. Jonn somehow manages to make the world seem at the same time more orderly and ungraspably huge and varied. * Helen Zaltzman *

Jonn Elledge is a New Statesman and New World columnist, a regular on the podcasts Oh God, What Now? and the late, lamented Paper Cuts, and a frequent contributor to the Big Issue, the Guardian and assorted other publications. He was previously an assistant editor at the New Statesman, where he created and ran its urbanism-focused CityMetric site, spending six happy years writing about cities, maps and borders and hosting the Skylines podcast. He has written three books, as well as over 200 editions of the Newsletter of (Not Quite) Everything. He lives in London, with the best dog in the world.