Food snobs, beware. The hoi polloi may soon be dominating the repartee at a dinner party near you, thanks to a new, slender (159 pages) and somewhat eccentric volume of epicurean esoterica called "Schott's Food & Drink Miscellany" (Bloomsbury, $14.95).

It was written by the slender and somewhat eccentric British collector of facts and figures Ben Schott (author also of the best-selling "Schott's Original Miscellany"), who works as a professional photographer and seems to be afflicted with a merry strain of obsessive-compulsive disorder you might find in a P.G. Wodehouse character. His modest book, he cautions in the introduction, is a "snapper-up of unconsidered trifles" that makes "very few claims to be exhaustive, authoritative, or even practical."

Which, of course, is why it is so much fun.

SCHOTT GLASS

In fact, it is Schott's systematic disorganization of information that makes his work as a "miscellanist" not just charming but much more compelling than those sorts of books that attempt to explicate the entire cultural history of, say, corn.

On page 116, a brief but informative passage about bird's nest soup falls below a seating diagram for Leonardo's "Last Supper"; to the right, on page 117, you'll find a chart of Fridge & Freezer Storage times for various foods — a juxtaposition that makes at least as much sense as anything else in this crazy world.

Which of us, after all, would not somehow be a better person once our brains contain the contents of Captain Nemo's larder aboard the Nautilus? (Loin of sea turtle, dolphin livers, marmalade of sea anemone.) Or all the lyrics to the original Chiquita Banana song from 1944 ("Bananas like the climate of the very, very tropical equator / So you should never put bananas in the refrigerator") or how to translate Laotian cooking measures into metric (a "hen's egg," or khai kai, is equivalent to 45 ml), or the slender dietary thread that connects St. Francis of Assisi to both Hitler and Tippi Hedren (vegetarianism).

CAESAR'S UDDER

On first glance, the book may seem too pointless to be of any value. But it is nearly impossible to estimate how a person's cleverness profile might skyrocket with the casual mention that Nigella is not just a zaftig cookbook author but also a peppery seed used for flavoring Indian food, or what was on the menus at President John F. Kennedy's 45th birthday party (crabmeat baked in seashell, medallions of beef glazed in madeira, followed by the presidential birthday cake and Marilyn Monroe) and at Julius Caesar's feast for the vestal virgins after his election as pontifex maximus in 63 B.C. (swine udders, prickly globefish, oysters). Or how to ask for the dinner bill in Swahili (Unaweza kunipa jumla ya hesabu?) or in Morse Code (— .... . / —... .. .—.. .—.. / .——. .—.. . .— ... .).

DISFIGURE A PEACOCK

"Schott's" is chockablock with the kinds of things that will allow the practical-minded reader to classify it as a textbook, even though it certainly is not one: random charts (shelf life of some canned goods, pan sizes, body mass index) illustrations (of types of pasta, poisonous mushrooms, a map of Australia denoting that country's beer-glass sizes), diagrams (on the Heimlich maneuver, how to sharpen a carving knife, traditional Amish family seating plan); epigrams (Robert Burns' "Address to a Haggis") and quotations ("To eat well in England you should have breakfast three times a day," said the pithy Somerset Maugham), and numerous lists, including one of 16th-century terms for carving a menagerie of animals (one mines a plover, barbs a lobster, disfigures a peacock) and another of 94 slang terms for drunkenness.

Any book will contain dubious information. For instance, American diner slang is treated here as if it were one rather than many regional languages, and the famous Chicago restaurant Arun's is referred to as Arnu's. But, staying one jump ahead of curmudgeonly readers who go looking for that sort of thing, Schott warns in his preface that he cannot "accept responsibility if you order a dish that does not agree with you ... or poison your favorite aunt. As Carl Jung said: 'Mistakes are, after all, the foundations of truth.' "

And the truth is, it's all very amusing.