Maria Church ran a tight ship, allegedly complaining about a £9.99 courier fee for documents relating to her mother.It is a story that underlines the fact that, no matter how exemplary the parents’ behaviour as managers may be, there will always be differences with their offspring. Things are happening so quickly for Joss that both she and her mother decided earlier this year it was better to bring in an experienced manager It was a mutual agreement – there was no row. David Woolf, spokesman for the singer, said: “There is a grain of truth in this in the sense that Joss’s parents have agreed for her to gain control of her trust at 21 rather than 25.”But it is pure conjecture that she now wants it next year and there has certainly been no row with her parents. One friend said: “She doesn’t want to go wild – she just wants to buy a house and treat her friends.”Publicists for Ms Stone, who is rapidly becoming one of the most bankable names in UK music, strongly denied the claims, describing as “conjecture” the idea that she wanted her money next April and rejecting any suggestion of a family split. In the meantime, she has reportedly “sacked” her mother as her manager and, according to a “close friend”, is in the midst of an unpleasant domestic struggle to take control of her money when she turns 18.The singer, who is on the verge of attaining the musical holy grail of breaking into America’s multi-billion dollar record industry with her latest album, Mind, Body & Soul, recently complained that she survives on “pocket money” and is “broker than my friend Emily who works in Burger King”. They know it, the parents know it and the media knows it.”It is at this stage that the showbiz rumour mill goes into overdrive, sensing the potential to rehearse its vocabulary of “bitter splits” and “angry sackings” as a wayward and newly-monied teenager achieves financial independence.Psychologists argue, however, that beneath the glitz of a high-profile row, the normal dynamics of family life are all too easily distorted.

As one prominent London-based agent put it: “Anyone with a successful teenager on their books lives in fear of them reaching 18. Not only do they have to reinvent themselves as an act but most of all the question of filthy lucre crops up. By the time she reaches her 18th birthday next April, it is estimated that figure will have doubled. Over tea and jam tarts, he finally discusses his brainchild.”Why don’t I give interviews?” he asks. “I don’t think that I have anything particularly interesting to say about the world. There’s a bizarre journalistic compulsion to find out The Man Behind the Book But there’s nothing here to find This book is really a design phenomenon. Do you like Philippe Starck? What he does is an expression of himself, but you don’t go and try and find out more.

With poets and novelists, there’s always a sense of the person behind the words. In my case, I’m more like a designer or an artist – and if you love the painting, does it really matter where the artist went to school?”And, by God, he means it about the design stuff. Give Schott a second’s enquiry about typography and he’ll rabbit for hours about nine-point grids and dotted tabs and the Golden Ratio of height-to-breadth or length-to-width.What emerges (if I may translate for you) is that every teeny detail of the Miscellany was painstakingly worked out on his home computer. Hours of concentration went into deciding which entries should stand across the gutter from which others, to achieve the most pleasing effect. Believing “there shouldn’t be too much ink on the page”, he eschewed bold type and underlinings, and made sure every paragraph ended flush against the right-hand margin “It was remarkably difficult to do. I had to find words inside sentences that could be changed, and make them longer or shorter I don’t like paragraphs that end raggedly. I want them to look like a pleasingly finished object.”A quality of obsession occasionally creeps into Schott’s hectic discourse.

You look at him and wonder if his German ancestry possibly drove him to this rage for order and harmony. But this, of course, cannot be true because he’s also responsible for the most random collection of facts seen for years. The actual content of his book is about as organised as a plate of spaghetti all’ alfredo.”No, there’s absolutely no logic to the various sections. I think the secret to the whole thing is an entry in the Original Miscellany about the Chinese encyclopaedia that was discovered by Dr Franz Kuhn.” He’s referring to a deeply mad reference book called The Celestial Empire of Benevolent Knowledge, which states that all animals can be classified in the following hierarchy: “a) belonging to the emperor, b) embalmed, c) tame, d) sucking pigs, e) sirens, f) fabulous, g) stray dogs, h) included in the present classification, i) that shake like a fool, j) innumerable, k) drawn with a very fine, camel-hair brush, l) etcetera, m) having just broken the water and n) that, if seen from a distance, look like flies”.”Marvellous, isn’t it?” says Schott, chuckling “It really amused me. It’s sort of taxonomy mixed with schizophrenia.” If an encyclopaedia could organise things in so crazily random a fashion, why couldn’t he offer gems of knowledge in a similar way? The other genesis of the book was an itch to self-publish, just to see if he could do it. What he produced on his table-top screen was pretty much the Miscellany that everybody bought that Christmas – a handsome vade-mecum of po-faced facts, such as the different periods of mourning that were observed in Victorian times for your late husband, child or second cousin “I never wanted it to be published,” he says.