Over several years of reviewing children's non-fiction, the rise and rise of Walker Books has been a recurring feature. The label has been, by and large, a mark of solid quality in an often crowded, confusing and exploitative field.
This year, however, it's gone beyond that. It's as though, after some sort of millennial Darwinian bloodletting, Walker has evolved to fill every ecological niche, marginalising all other publishers. (Bloodletting is not too strong a term, it seems, to describe the events at Dorling Kindersley following its disastrous over-investment in lavish, unwanted Star Wars books. As it nursed its wounds, DK was taken over by media group Pearson - which owns Penguin among other things - so perhaps we can expect a spirited return to the fray.)
Thus, in the stack of books the literary department handed out to me this time, Walker dominates: among the nature and science books; among the history books; among the how-to-do-it books. So much so that where I haven't named a publisher below, you can assume it's Walker.
Guess-which-publisher has now brought out paperback editions of its brightly produced but slightly cruel Informania series (£4.99 each in UK). Cruel? Well, the four books in Informania - previously published in cute spiral-bound form - purport to be adolescent-friendly factfiles on, respectively, ghosts, vampires, aliens and killer sharks. What they really do is debunk: the first three categories of creature, we learn at some length, exist only in the movies, while sharks only killed six people in 1998 - while people killed many tens of thousands of sharks.
Not surprisingly, Informania: Sharks, with text by Christopher Maynard, is the strongest on real facts, is least likely to turn your child into a despised schoolyard killjoy - and also uses the "multimedia" conceit of this series to best effect.
It's divided into a section that looks like a teen magazine, another in the form of "crime files" from the FBI (Fish Bureau of Investigation), a section formatted like pages from a computer database and one done in the form of student notes on shark reproduction.
Sharks are also the subject of one of the dozen Oxford Reds (Oxford University Press, £2.99 in UK each), a series of small 32-page paperbacks. They share the factfile approach with Informania, but are simpler, far less dog's-dinnery in appearance, aimed at newish readers and very well written. Their subjects all actually exist - cars, whales, spiders, wolves, bees, frogs and toads.
Of course, there's a better way to learn about frogs than reading a book, and Growing Frogs (£9.99 in UK), a handsome hardcover by Vivian French, sweetly illustrated by Alison Bartlett, shows the way. Like many of the best fact-books for younger children, its science wears a storybook camouflage, and is all the more clearly communicated for that.
A similarly attractive hardback collaboration, this time between Robie H. Harris and illustrator Michael Emberley, could be called Growing People. Instead, its title is a mouthful: Let's Talk About Where Babies Come From (£10.99 in UK). Text-heavy enough to provide detailed reading for older kids, bits of it are also bright and funny enough to make it a read-along book for pre-schoolers.
Some adults may be uncomfortable with how far it moves beyond the biological basics: it puts sex firmly, if somewhat unscientifically, in the context of loving relationships; it also encourages acceptance of differences in family structures and refers unjudgmentally to contraception, AIDS and abortion.
As for more far-removed human activities, look out for more paperback editions of WhoElse's History News series (£5.99 each in UK). Big books that teach history in newspaper form, the "stories" range from the big events of the past to hunting tips in The Stone Age News (a particularly superb effort by Fiona Macdonald) and fashion advice in The Viking News.
They sure beat British Museum Press's Journey Through Time series by Roberta Angeletti (£8.99 in UK each, translated from her original Italian editions). The Cave Painter of Lascaux and The Minotaur of Knossos, incoherent stories aimed at under10s, abjectly fail to lead the reader into some greater understanding of their subjects. The same goes for Checkmate at Chess City by Piers Harper (Walker Books - yes - £9.99 in UK).
The same publisher is back on track with The Walker Book of Children's Cookery (£5.99 in UK) by Roz Denny and Caroline Waldegrave. In a glutted market, it offers a decent, standard set of recipes - kid-friendly but not kiddie food, not too heavy on meat, a little sweet - with clear illustrations and instructions. (That said, I've little faith in the long-term utility of a paperback cookbook.)
Finally, clear illustrations and instructions don't come easily, as I think Irish publisher O'Brien Press has found with its foray into the genre with the Art and Craft Explorer series (£4.99 each) for eight-and-ups, in collaboration with Mary Carroll and Katie Long of Pine Forest Art Centre. Varying by the page from thoroughly confusing to almost-inspiring, they nonetheless represent reasonable value. And hey, they're not from Walker.
Harry Browne is an Irish Times journalist