The rising popularity of "miscellaneous information"

From an interesting article at Boston.com:

Last month, Perigee Books brought out “The World’s Greatest Book of Useless Information,” the fifth “Book of Useless Information” published since that series appeared in 2006. This is not to be confused with the “Essential Book of Useless Information,” due out from Perigee this fall, nor with the unrelated “That Book...of Perfectly Useless Information,” published by Harper in 2004, or its sequels, “This Book...of More Perfectly Useless Information” and “The Other Book...of the Most Perfectly Useless Information...”

In a world where useful and important answers come looking for you, it is the idea of unimportance that is the primary selling point of the miscellanies. The books promise to guide the reader somewhere older and slower, to create a little world in which information can serve as amusement rather than currency. A carefully done miscellany appears random, but it achieves a sort of quiet intellectual bustle, set apart from the roar of the daily info-chaos. The miscellanies are information as art, and art for art’s sake...

“It’s mindless entertainment, is basically what it is,” said Don Voorhees, author of “The Essential Book of Useless Information” and six previous books of trivia and miscellany...