Yet Ben Schott’s collection of spectacularly useless information, Schott’s Original Miscellany, has become an inexplicable publishing phenomenon, translated into 14 languages and selling more than 600,000 copies. It has earned its creator serious money and spawned an entire genre of jokey reference books; one is called Shite’s Unoriginal Miscellany.

Like most bad habits Schott’s forthcoming 2006 collection, Schott’s Almanac, is embarrassingly addictive and seems destined to fill thousands of stockings this Christmas.

Did you know that British Airways is far more likely to lose your luggage than a host of iffy-sounding airlines? Or that the French sleep for half an hour longer than us each day?

If you imagine that these gems were harvested by a gnarled Dickensian drone in a cobwebbed attic, you’d be wrong. Schott is a mere 31. An animated figure topped with a thick black quiff and staring out from even thicker black glasses, he occupies a flat in Highgate, north London.

True, his working environment is near-Victorian, with polished walnut desk, silver candelabra and a porcelain phrenological head. But he also has a high-tech drum machine and likes Hammond organ music, fine wines, cigars, the theatre and is a fan of the alternative music station Xfm.

Schott’s latest almanac is a blend of his fascination with the trivial and a multi- faceted snapshot of the past 12 months. Hence the Department of Health’s “hospital episode statistics” telling us that while 1,481 people were treated for “contact with hot drinks”, there were only two for “contact with centipede”, and at the same time providing maps of United Nations peacekeeper deployments.

One of Schott’s most significant facts — to him at least — is that celebrity magazines found the most important phenomenon of the year to be the marriage of the model Jordan to Peter Andre, both fugitives from the reality TV show I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here!

“You can’t have an almanac without reference to I’m a Celebrity,” Mr Miscellany declares. “It is more a part of my year than what earls are up to. Even earls are not interested in earls any more.” A dig, this, at Whitaker’s Almanac, the oldest continually published annual in Britain. “This is life as it now is: Tony Blair feels he has to watch tapes of Little Britain so he knows the catchphrases. You can’t say ‘this is the year’ without mentioning Crazy Frog.”

This leads inexorably to the Schott theory of what is interesting: “That which you think will be boring will turn out to be really interesting, and things you think will be brilliant are like walking through treacle.”

When not spending hours in the British Library’s humanities sections tittering at nuggets of exotica, he does much of his research by eavesdropping in bars — which elicited strange calendars that “people live by but you have never heard of”. With just one helper, he is a self-confessed control freak, making every decision down to the book’s typesetting.

The almanac’s take on history is entirely his own: “You have to make editorial judgments. I found my obituary of Dave Allen was initially twice the length of Edward Heath’s, which seemed a bit rude.”

He is increasingly helped by readers, mainly eccentrics — a funeral director has written detailing the consistencies of cremated remains.