Consume in bite-sized chunks

Because there is a helpful pile of them beside the till in every bookshop in the land and because my incuriosity about "the publishing sensation of the the year" (The Guardian) is not entire, I have three or four times flipped through Schott's Original Miscellany for at least half a minute.

It's not quite a non-book by a non-writer for the non-reader - though it's not that far off. The astute wheeze was to compose what is essentially an inventory of lists, yet to annotate them, vary them and juxtapose them in such a way that the whole doesn't appear too overtly formulaic.

This follow-up eschews the titular boast "original", which is wise, for that is self-evidently the property which a commonplace book is bound not to display. It is neatly designed and pleasantly eclectic. But browsing for half a minute is one thing, reading for half an hour is quite another.

Sure, it is not really intended to be consumed thus. It is a loo-book. I am the last person who'd employ the expression "useless facts" - all facts are potentially fascinating depending on what they're used for, how they're deployed, how fresh they are.

The problem with Schott, like any other listmonger, is that he provides little besides bald facts. It's a relentless and bizarrely homogeneous diet unmitigated by opinion or polemic or thesis or even the glue of an authorial voice.

The occasional attempts at humour recall the bumptiousness of a Boden catalogue: the punters almost certainly overlap. The thing drags on, and on, like some idiot relation jabbering in the corner at Christmas. Which wouldn't matter were the jabbering not so mundane, so familiar.

Schott is a hyperactive magpie with a library ticket, a broadband connection and a sure talent for covering his tracks. He discloses his sources only reticently. Some are obvious, others are more difficult to guess at and ought not to have remained occluded. Attribution is at least a courtesy. He has delved into recipe books, books of quotations, gastronomic encyclopaedias, works on folklore, food chemistry and cocktails, travel literature, sacred texts, the lives of the chefs, household manuals, herbals, food-agency pamphlets, oenological arcana, company histories, diet plans etc. His energy and resourcefulness are beyond reproach.

It is, however, by his discrimination that an anthologist must be judged. Much of what Schott includes suggests that he was rather ignorant of the subject. Why else would he repeat so much stale material? Open it at any page and you'll be greeted by some old and unwelcome aquaintance: rock groups' contractual demands for food and drink, a very partial list of poisonous fungus, Mrs Beeton's recipe for Christmas pudding, deaths from blowfish, the varieties of caviar, famous vegetarians, epicurean eponyms, a paragraph on Parmentier, archaic synonyms for "drunk", the constituents of various sauces, that bloody feast in the Paris zoo, figurative expressions using bread and water ...

Who is this for? Presumably Schott and Bloomsbury have calculated that there are a lot of non-readers as gastronomically deficient as he is, wanting to give their similarly bereaved friends a

He will not be disappointed. Food-writing and ignorance are new British bedfellows. As we get to eat (a bit) better, the standard of writing about it plummets: perhaps the golden age of David and Grigson was conditional on privation, on food as fantasy. Today the only food books which sell are non-books: Jamie Oliver ad vomitum, all the other telly tie-ins. Food and Schott form a combination that is depressingly liable to prove yet another "publishing sensation".