When they’re done well, children’s books that are all catalog, no narrative can be particularly delectable. These books are really nothing more than artfully assembled illustrated lists of objects and events, but they allow for a certain kind of reading experience: not following a story so much as hanging out in a world. “Look,” these books say, “there’s this and there’s this, and over here there’s this.” (Is it a stretch to call them distant relatives of the essay form?) And in some ways they’re the ultimate showcase of the book illustrator’s art, since visual detail must carry the weight.

The master of this genre is, of course, Richard Scarry, whose Busytown books thrum with action without ever quite reaching the level of plot. The magnetic pull of his pages on children’s eyes is quite something to behold. Each of my three children spent many nights between the ages of about 3 and 4 requesting not a bedtime story, per se, but time with an oversize version of Scarry’s “Best Word Book Ever”; we would test each other by naming a detail for the other to find (a pickle car; a fox losing his hat; a pretzel shop; a spectacular car wreck involving a pick-up truck carrying watermelons; and everyone’s favorite, a unisex bathroom in an airplane). Somehow, by the last page (a colorful array of planes and helicopters being repaired, cleaned and flown by Scarry’s usual range of creatures), a relaxing feeling of resolution would arrive, as if, having surveyed such a vast range of human activity, we could now let go of the world and go to sleep.

Scarry died in 1994, but in the endlessly egressive tradition of children’s book franchises, he has a new volume out. It’s called “Richard Scarry’s Best Lowly Worm Book Ever!” and his son, Huck Scarry, is responsible for it, having found a bunch of sketches and the outline for the book among his father’s papers and finished it up himself. It’s a small but welcome addition to the Scarry oeuvre and, assuming it’s the last that we will have, a fitting farewell to Busytown. In an interview with NPR, Huck Scarry said the dashing, cheerful worm was a kind of afterthought that his father added to the early books so that there would always be some small extra thing to find. He named him only when children wrote asking what he was called. Lowly had already starred in a couple of his own books (“The Adventures of Lowly Worm” and “Richard Scarry’s Lowly Worm Word Book”), but his own omnibus “Best Ever” book was the final Scarry stone left unturned, as it were.

In its pages, Lowly walks us through his day, and you can see all the pluck and derring-do that it takes to be Lowly. “I write on the board,” he says on a page devoted to his school day; if you’re wondering how a worm writes, he wraps the chalk with the midsection of his body. Shoelaces, he ties with his mouth, doors he opens with his one “foot.” We learn Lowly’s approach to manners, see him make a trip to the country to visit Farmer Pig, and review letters and numbers with him. There’s a spread of Lowly returning to his roots and hiding in various tableaus.