By Ripley Entertainment
Two hundred fifty-six pages of odd-but-true records and stop-you-cold photographs, built to open anywhere rather than read front to back.
A circus performer who is paralyzed from the waist down doing a balancing act that looks impossible. Rare artifacts photographed close enough to see the dust on them. Odd animals, art nobody can explain, real places that look invented, stunts that make you cover your mouth. It's built in small chunks — short stories with big headlines, lists, callouts — so a child can open to any page and land on something. Some entries have QR codes; scan one and you can go watch the thing actually happen on video.
A records book answers who holds the most of something. Ripley's answers how is that real, which tends to hold a child longer, because there's no number to memorize — just a strange thing that happened and a photo of it. So the pages get looked at instead of skimmed. And it's genuinely browse-and-graze: no order to follow, nothing to fall behind on, which is why it suits a reader who won't commit to a whole book. You open it and land on something, and often that's enough to make them go find someone to show it to.