I’m looking for a book or two for a Christmas gift for my brother-in-law. My sister says he loves books with lots and lots of information in them. For example, he’s read their encyclopeidas four times. She gave him “Atlas Obscura” for Father’s Day and he loved that. He has a book about baseball stadiums that he’s read over and over again.
Suggestions?
The Straight Dope by Cecil Adams
The Bathroom Reader series might work here.
Are those “Book of Lists” books still around?
All five volumes.
An Incomplete Education: https://www.amazon.com/Incomplete-Education-Things-Learned-Probably/dp/0345468902
The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy: https://www.amazon.com/New-Dictionary-Cultural-Literacy-American/dp/0618226478/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1505664487&sr=1-1&keywords=Book+of+cultural+literacy
CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics. Okay, it’s very tightly focussed information, but, boy howdy, that book contains a LOT of information!
As a much lesser offering…but a heck of a lot of fun…the Big Secrets trilogy (Big Secrets, Bigger Secrets, Biggest Secrets) by William Poundstone. (Actually, the first book is the best one, and the next two are weaker and weaker.)
The Straight Dope books by Cecil Adams are lots of fun…as are the comparable rumor-busting books by Jan Harold Brunvand (The Baby Train, The Mexican Pet, Curses Broiled Again, etc.)
Another fun offering in this vein is The New Apocrypha, by John T. Sladek. It’s a quick and dirty survey of the kind of total nonsense that some people believed in at the time of the writing – and which too darn many people still believe in today. He hits things like Nostradamus, psychic detectives, creationism, etc. As one reviewer said on Amazon, “'The New Apocrypha; belongs on the bookshelf right next to Martin Gardner’s ‘Fads & Fallacies In The Name Of Science’ and James Randi’s ‘Flim-Flam’. Better than that you cannot get.” Struth!
Get him post graduate legal volumns…You should able to find them at estate auctions…He can actually teach himself the law. Wouldn’t that be fun ?
I highly recommend The People’s Almanac (3 volumes), also published by David Wallechinsky and Irving Wallace, between 1975 and 1981. Some of it is out of date, and they do include a lot of bullshit, but there’s a lot of interesting esoterica in them as well. Used copies can be found on Amazon for a few bucks, and new copies are around $50.
The World Almanac is updated every year and contains a huge amount of information in a small book.
If he is into trivia I really enjoy this book by Ken Jennings (of Jeopardy! fame):
Thanks for the ideas so far. I’d say he’s more into travel/history than trivia.
Trying out for Jeopardy?
The Grout, known to non-music-majors as A History of Western Music. I tried using a highlighter in mine and ended up with about four solid yellow pages and kinda gave up on that idea.
Liquid Intelligence. At the end of it, if he isn’t one of the world’s best mixologists, he’s not trying.Plus, you learn some chemistry, physics, biology and what happens to second hand scientific equipment! 
Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything
It’s ridiculous I got beat on a recommendation for The People’s Almanac.
“A lot of BS”
Well considering the first chapter is “Predictions by psychics”
Mental Floss has a lot of a good trivia books available. Look them up on amazon as an Author and you will see. I also liked their World History and US History books.
There are loads of QI books on Amazon, and the podcast team are releasing a book later this year too.