Publication Date: 1st July 2021

The Blurb

Ever wondered which 10 dinosaurs were the largest, and what they weighed…in cats? Or how much of your DNA you share with other animals…and bananas? Enter the listiverse and get ready to see the world in a whole new way. Listified! takes the best and most amazing parts of the universe – erupting volcanoes, medieval machines, jumping spiders, exploding stars and everything in between – and organises them into quirky list form for curious kids and their friends and family to enjoy.

Brought to life by imaginative and hilarious artworks, each list presents subjects from new and unexpected angles. So let Britannica’s Listified! take you on a journey through 300 lists that illuminate everything from the human body, to prehistoric creatures, planet Earth, outer space and the mysteries beyond. Here are three mind-blowing facts from Listified! to get you started…

• A Tyrannosaurus rex could swallow 15,000 hamburgers in a single bite.
• A bolt of lightning is the width of your thumb and five times hotter than the surface of the Sun.
• If you tied all your hair together into a single cord, it could support the weight of 18 cows.

The Review

Every time Britannica bring out a new book, I sit there thinking there is no way they can better this, and then, Listified! landed. I was in non-fiction heaven! This is a truly mind-blowing collection of the most amazing facts all organised into lists.

Whether your curiosity is piqued by the animals, environments, inventions, machines or the weather, there really is a list to draw everyone in, and then you get lost in the cornucopia of trivia in this captivating compendium.

Highly engaging spreads use a mix of photography and captivating illustrations, both informative and humorous.

A perfect present that will give hours of delight for inquisitive minds no matter how old, and a must for adding trivia and joy into curriculum lessons. Add one in to registration to build a class of quizzers to beat the Chasers and be fastest finger first on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire!

The Guest Post by Andrew Pettie

As you may have guessed from the title, Listified! is a children’s book that is literally bursting with lists: 300 to be precise. It also contains 460 funny and fascinating footnotes, thousands of mind-blowing facts and 19 illustrations of chickens. So it might surprise you to learn that there were EVEN MORE lists and facts that I unearthed during my research that didn’t quite make the cut. 

To show you what I mean, here is a special behind-the-scenes list of 10 lists that I sadly didn’t have room for:

1. Peak Performance – a list of the tallest mountains in the Solar System.

2. Translatosaurus – a list of famous dinosaurs and how they got their names.

3. Game On – a list of the 20 Monopoly playing tokens that have featured since 1935.

4. People Power – a list of the organisations around the world that employ the largest number of people.

5. Life Lessons – a list of famous people who proved their terrible school reports completely wrong.

And here is a list of 5 footnote facts that didn’t quite make it onto the bottom of the page:

1. If you lined up all the other planets of the Solar System in a row they could fit in the gap between the Earth and the Moon.

2. A colony of beavers in Northern Alberta, Canada, has built a dam so big it is visible from space.

3. The Eiffel Tower sways six to seven centimetres in high winds and shrinks by 15 centimetres in cold weather.

4. In 1535, King Henry VIII of England introduced a tax on beards despite having one himself.

5. Modern ice hockey pucks are made of rubber but early games were played with pucks made from frozen cow poo.

If you’re the sort of person who is intrigued by lists and fascinated by facts, then you will find hundreds more just like these on the pages of Listified!. Enjoy the lists!

LISTIFIED! Britannica’s 300 lists that will blow your mind by Andrew Pettie, illustrated by Andrés Lozano out now in hardback (£18.99, Britannica Books)

Huge thanks to Britannica for inviting me to take part in the blog tour, and to Andrew Pettie for a fascinating guest post. I’d have loved to have seen that list of Life Lessons. Do make sure you check out the rest of the blog tour!