Random Illustrated Facts by Mike Lowery

I have found the Platonic ideal of the cash-wrap impulse-buy book. What title could possibly be better, or more comprehensive of the category, than Random Illustrated Facts?

Even better, this is exactly what it claims to be, and it's actually longer and more detailed than it needed to be - about two hundred pages, divided into five sections on History, Animals, Food/Drink, Science, and Everyday Things, sometimes with one big fact on a page and sometimes featuring multiple related facts per page.

All the lettering is hand-drawn, in a charmingly appealing style that changes size as it goes, by author Mike Lowery. And obviously all of the art is also drawn by Lowery; that's kinda the point of the book. In his introduction, he talks about how his habit of keeping sketchbooks changed over the years, as he started talking small notebooks everywhere and then drawing weird facts as he learned them. So, if I'm reading it right, this book is far more organic than I assumed: it's a curated selection of the random pages Lowery made over the course of several years, about things that interested him at odd moments about odd things.

All that is much more random than I assumed, of course, and it thus makes the book that much better. Lowery's energetic illustrative style, full of curlicues and dot eyes and exaggerated expressions, is equally amusing and inventive - I saw his stuff for the first time a couple of months ago with One Star Wonders, and I'm now low-key looking for more.

Look: what you have here are 1) Random, 2) Illustrated, 3) Facts. Just like it says on the tin. How can you go wrong?

(One minor consumer note: I read this in a digital form in my library's Hoopla app. On a few scattered pages, it appeared that some elements were missing on the page - maybe because of a layering error in composition? Here's an example, from what I think is page 18.)