Today we encountered a car-boot sale, where we picked up this book for a dollar:
The Book of Ten Thousand Things, edited by Arthur Mee, famed editor of
The Children's Encylopaedia and the
Children's Newspaper. This is a supplementary volume to a series of twelve books called
The Children's Treasure House.
Ten thousand things for a dollar is pretty good value for money, I think.
Arthur Mee was active at the end of the 19th century, and the first part of the 20th. He was quite unabashedly a British Protestant exceptionalist, and his children's books were full of inspiring patriotic and moral tales to make the youth of Britain ready for the administration of Empire.
He was not at all averse to explaining just how all the non-Christian, non-Protestant religions of the world were wrong and bad, and that Catholics (for example), while many of them good at heart, were basically poor deluded fools, while Buddhists, Hindus and the like were barely better than animals.
Although he didn't say so in so many words, one got the sense that he felt pretty much the same about anybody who had the misfortune to be non-British.
Anyway, here's a little sampling of this particular gem of a volume.
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| Fifteen BAD things |
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| Beware of the hidden celluloid menace! |
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| Carriage spotter's guide |
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| A selection of colonialist exploiters |
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| 25 uses for asbestos (!) |
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| Some science experiments for children |
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| How things got their names |
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| British Medals of the Empire |
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| Badges of the Scouts and Guides |
