Usefully Useless: Everything You'd Never Learn at School

by Mark Hank

Usefully Useless is a gloriously diverse volume dedicated to the most engrossing trivia in the world.

Guaranteed to excite the curiosity and amuse, its pages are filled with the sort of remarkable information you would never learn, but will be overjoyed to discover. Each fact is irresistibly fun and fascinating - the essence of anecdote and dinner-party conversation that is essential in the adult world - and, above all, usefully useless.

Guaranteed to improve your mind, Usefully Useless contains a wealth of miscellany on a vast range of topics, including Literature, Geography, Food, Science, the Natural World, Sport and Politics - from the export of frogs' legs to the longest Monopoly game completed in the bath. Usefully Useless provides answers to such eternal questions as:

What was Margaret Thatcher's favourite sitcom?

Which British league football team's name has no letters that one could colour in with a pen?

How many calories do you consume when you lick a stamp?

What was the original colour of Coca-Cola?

Which key do toilets flush in?

Find out these answers and many, many more in Usefully Useless, the essential guide to the facts you never thought you'd need to know.

Genres: Nonfiction

336 pages, Hardcover

First published November 3, 2011

Reviews

[Lee · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm very glad that I picked this book up at Liverpool St Station in London. It's full of really interesting and quirky facts which are presented to you in a good way. A wonderful coffee-table kind of book. :)

[Mark · Rating 1 out of 5]

A hodge-podge of a book, with inaccuracies and errors throughout. Possibly entertaining to some, but very rapidly dated by things like internet-traffic related 'facts' that now belong to the past. Suitably bitty to be a bathroom book, and lacking any sense of grouping or organisation.
Not a book that I would recommend, sadly.

[Jenny · Rating 5 out of 5]

A nice little book containing a wide variety of well-chosen interesting factlets in the manner of Schott's Miscellany but a little less intellectual in content. I give it such a generous rating because it engrossed me so much that I missed my train stop - something that I am not exactly thankful for, but is certainly the mark of a good read. Also, the effort that must have gone into sifting through all that information on Wikipedia and the IMDB is, probably, extraordinary.

[Gary · Rating 3 out of 5]

Just okay.