EVER SINCE THE infamous definition of a horse by Thomas Gradgrind in Dickens’s Hard Times, facts have been thought inimical to children’s development.

Yet as one whose most prized childhood possession was an encyclopaedia, I know that facts stimulate young minds with wonder, excitement, curiosity and — ultimately — imagination. So what were the best nonfiction books of the year for them? It is important to get young children to look at things more carefully, and Gillian Wolfe, head of education at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, South London, encourages that with Look! Seeing the Light in Art (Frances Lincoln, £12.99/offer £11.99), part of a splendid series that deserves to be better known. She shows how artists use light almost as a stage effect, picking out details of shadow and lightlights, and selecting just the pictures that children of 4+ will respond to.

Equally lovely is Kyle Olmon and Tracy Sabin’s pop-up Castle: Medieval Days and Knights (Scholastic, £19.99/£17.99), a must for 5+, stuffed with interesting information about medieval history, and with spectacular paper engineering. No boy could resist the tournament knights charging each other, the see-through castle or the silver-suited knight rising from the page with upraised sword. Pauline Baynes, who has illustrated C. S. Lewis’s Narnia books, continues the medieval theme with her beautiful bestiary of Questionable Creatures (Frances Lincoln, £10.99/£9.99) from manticores to mermaids, which includes, weirdly, the horse.

Whitaker’s World of Facts by Russell Ash (A&C Black, £19.99/£17.99) takes a more sober approach, with time-lines, web links and chapters ranging from “Space”, “World History” and “The Human Body” to more abstract concepts such as “Time”, “Politics” and “Dead Ends” (unusual deaths). Ploddy but straightforward for 8+ to dip into at bedtime.

What is the point of encyclopaedias if you have the internet? Dorling Kindersley’s Pick Me Up: Stuff you Need to Know (10+, £19.99/ £17.99) addresses this head-on. With an absolutely stunning holographic cover, this has to be the most eye-catching encyclopaedia yet published, and its revolutionary approach continues inside with strip cartoons to explain how dogs sense things, brilliant use of photomontage, graphics, 3-D drawings and typography.

There’s something here for everyone — about what happens to us when we dream, how democracy works, how Leonardo da Vinci made the future, about advertising, evolution, oratory and languages.

Information is linked to other pages, sending young readers off on a quest that will absorb them for hours. Head and shoulders above any other fact book published this year, it is so far out of the box that you may even need the duller kind of encyclopaedia to make sure that basic knowledge is covered.

Judy Allen’s The Encyclopedia of the Unexplained (Kingfisher, £17.99/£16.19) summons up all the usual suspects from haunted houses and the Bermuda Triangle to crop circles and alien abductions. In Ripley’s Believe it or Not! (Century, £17.99/£16.19), Robert Ripley looks at weird customs, with the Japanese, Americans and Australians coming in for much mirth for having glow-in-the-dark gravestones, toilet themed restaurants and 100-year-old light bulbs. Both completely bonkers and great fun for 10+.

Most useful of all, however, is Sam Stern’s Real Food, Real Fast (Walker, £9.99/ £9.49). It is as important for kids of 11+ to learn to cook as it is for them to feed. The teenager Stern’s unpretentious and engaging Cooking Up a Storm, published last year, proved him a Jamie Oliver of the future. Fact books teach us how to do things. If you want your children living as well as thinking independently, a cookbook for Christmas beats an encyclopaedia hands down.

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