Ben Schott would prefer it if everything that you knew about him came from his books — that he has a quirky, interrogating view of the world, approaching with equal diligence the Pakistan-Kashmiri earthquake and the contenders in this year’s Big Brother.

He has published three Miscellanies, and is on to his second annual Almanac; books that burst with facts and concise breakdowns of big subjects. In four years Schott, 32, has sold more than two million books and he would rather talk about research methods than himself.

Given the books’ beautiful, arcane design, you might expect Schott to wear plus fours and a monocle. But no, he’s very much the overgrown public schoolboy in Sunday best: dark pinstripe jacket, pink shirt, blue jeans and brown loafers, topped off with a curtainy quiff. So what’s hot in Schott’s Almanac 2007? “With Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (the President of Iran) I went through around 60,000 words of reports,” he says excitedly. “Family background. The mercurial mix of firebrand and philosopher. He was in the World Mayor finals with Mayor Bloomberg (of New York) and Ken Livingstone — which is funny on two levels. The fact he was in them and that there is something called the World Mayor Finals.”

The books drip with eccentricity and anoraky fervour. Schott denies that he possesses either, yet he researches, writes and designs everything almost single-handedly, apart from the illustrations. Recently he took on assistants: one in Germany and one in New York — tough for a self-confessed control freak who says that he can spend hours making a page look just right.

The Miscellanies and Almanacs have a certain tone of voice, he claims, “politically neutral but with a sense of texture”, that he hopes does not reveal what he thinks of I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here!, the Eta ceasefire or wire-tapping.

He likes to pull together strands of high and low culture — “It’s a mistake to think that they are separate” — and prefers footnotes to the big story: “I’ll write about who wore what dress at the Oscars, not what won Best Foreign Language film. The Almanac is about taking a step back from the 24-hour news cycle.”

Schott grew up in Hampstead, North London. His father is a doctor, his mother a nurse. “My father wrote rococo papers about Leonardo’s handwriting and the evolution of the male and female signs in different cultures. From him I got a love of the quirky footnote.”

He went to the private University College School, wasn’t particularly academic but “worked out what they wanted in exams. The school embraced eccentricity. I did a lot of photography and theatre lighting. I didn’t know who the head of rugby was, but I knew all the good actors and debaters. It was much more about the liberal arts than muddy playing fields.”

Schott toyed with becoming a photographer but studied social and political science at Oxford. In the library one day, immersed in Foucault, he came across a list, quoted by Foucault, that Borges had entitled “Celestial Empire of Benevolent Knowledge” and which defined all animals in 14 absurd ways, such as “tame”, “if seen from a distance, look like flies” and “belonging to the Emperor”.

“It made me laugh out loud, much to the annoyance of others in the library,” he recalls. “The craziness of the listing challenged everything about traditional taxonomy and was the seed for much of the character, layout and haphazard juxtaposition of the Miscellanies.” (The whole list is on page 14 of his first book.) Schott became an account manager at the advertising agency J. Walter Thompson, but hated how uncreative it was, leaving after four months.

He set up as a photographer and his subjects included John Prescott who was rude, and Sir Roy Strong, who had “the most wonderful, doleful eyes” and told him: “You must realise I’m awfully photogenic.” Tony Blair asked Schott if he’d like to see then-baby Leo; Cherie barked at him not to take too long as they were about to have lunch.

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