What does it tell us that among a stack of volumes of information and reference for children that has crash-landed in our front room, the brightest, liveliest, most intelligently written are Star Wars Episode I: The Visual Dictionary and Star Wars Episode I: Incredible Cross-Sections? (What does it tell us that these superlatives don't remotely apply to the movie?)
Yes, these books, both written by David West Reynolds and handsomely produced by Lucas Books and Dorling Kindersley (each £12.99 in the UK), are lovingly detailed explorations of people, planets, cultures and technologies that don't exist; they fall, headlong, into a category labelled "pointless". And still I'd be quicker to peruse them with my kids than much of the allegedly factual competition.
Take, for example, The Usborne Animated Children's Encyclopaedia by Jane Elliott and Colin King (£19.99 in UK). This insipid doorstopper for pre-teens qualifies as "animated" because if you stick the accompanying CD-ROM in your PC, a few characters hop across the screen. The book seems to be a pared-back version of the CD-ROM, and partly due to that editing process, perhaps, it contains inexcusable errors which could easily make their way into school reports.
For example: a cartoon illustration labelled "280 million years ago" shows giant dinosaurs roaming the earth; another, marked "190 million years ago" shows massive mammals nibbling at treetops; another shows a female hominid of 2.5 million years ago modestly garbed in an animal skin (the man's in the nip). Numerous other natural, historical and cultural phenomena are mangled and over-simplified; then there's the long search for a dark-skinned face among the illustrations - ending, at last, in a cartoon showing an Olympic winners' podium . . . Steer clear.
Similar warnings apply to the same publisher's ludicrous The Usborne Great Wildlife Search (£9.99 in UK) and its worthier but boring 101 Things to Do on the Internet (£6.99 in UK). In the latter category, your aspiring nerd might prefer the insistently hip, cleverly designed, issue-oriented Cyberscene: A Teen Traveller's Guide to the Web by Aussie teen-geek Nick Moraitis (Penguin, £6.99 in UK).
Much younger children, like our four- and seven-year-olds, actually get a reasonable service from Walker Books, whose sweet little hardcovers in the Sam's Science series by Kate Rowan include well-illustrated explanations of everyday biological questions - including I Know Why I Brush My Teeth and I Know How My Cells Make Me Grow (each £6.99 in UK). Walker's charming series of newspaper pastiches for slightly bigger kids, The History News, also returns with In Space, a series of "front pages" on great moments in astronomy and space exploration (£10.99 in UK). I prefer it to, say, the rock-solid Oxford Children's A to Z of Space (£6.99 in UK) coz I like history and newspapers.
But the book that keeps coming back to the top of the heap is The Weatherbirds: An Incredible Journey Through the Weather of the World by Ted Dewan (Viking, £12.99 in UK). It should be a model of the genre: it's got a cute, funny adventure story about a bunch of birds sailing a big balloon around the north Atlantic - and that story expands, as much or as little as you and the tykes prefer, into fabulously clear, thoroughly uncondescending explanations of clouds, rain, lightning, deserts, hurricanes, you name it. And dotted throughout are nifty exercises that are unusually easy to organise.
No, we wouldn't be without our collection of "pointless" storybooks. But why can't more children's books be like The Weatherbirds, informative and a bit of fun into the bargain?