That there are printing mistakes in this book is a crying shame. For a book that will rise or fall on the veracity of its data, to have twelve pages with the data missing is more than unfortunate. That this UK addition has the same mistakes as an earlier American edition, seems like commercial suicide. What were Collins thinking? I feel for David McCandless, as this book has clearly been a labour of love.

That said, 'Information is Beautiful' is a brilliant book. If the twelve messed up pages were completely absent, it would still be a brilliant book. So even though you feel like you are being cheated, you're not. The other 244 pages are a feast for the eyes, and are well worth parting you from your cash. The US version is in its second edition, so if you want it to be perfect, maybe you could wait for the same over here? (There is an downloadable errata on 'IiB' website)

February strikes me as an odd date for the release of this book. It's exactly the sort of thing you would expect to see on the shelves in the run up to Christmas. It's Schott's Almanac on acid, made to appeal to the reader's inner geek. McCandless' mission is to take the assault of information that comes with living in the technological age, and represent it in a way that is easy to understand: Visually. He does so with aplomb - there are hundreds of facts in here, all in glorious technicolor.

There are graphs, pie charts and flow charts, fairly ordinary ways of displaying information, but there are also bubble clusters, Coxcombs and the delightfully named 'semantic polar grids', which are like candy for nerds. There is even a page displaying visual ways of displaying information. Subjects range from Creation Myths to Salad Dressings, via The Middle East. It's wonderful!

I must confess that you don't have to cut into me very far before you reach my inner geek (nerdiness is only skin deep), but I love this book. I've been flicking through it for hours much to the annoyance of my wife. This is a fine reference book (though I have no idea about the quality of the data collected), and would make an ideal gift for the geek in your life.