Roamer: Celebrating the centenary of one thousand beautiful things

Coincidentally, its centenary year coincides with the 150th anniversary of the author’s birth in Stapleford, near Nottingham, on 21 July 1875.

Arthur Mee was “incredibly prolific” said novelist, academic, journalist and broadcaster Ian Sansom on a 2008 BBC radio documentary which was repeated recently.

Applauding Mee as “historian, encyclopaedist, polemicist and educator” Sansom wrote in a 2007 Guardian article “he was not merely prolific, but hyper or superior-prolific: proliferent, proliferous.”

Mee reckoned he wrote an average of one million words a year for 50 years - “there are so many books that there is no standard bibliography. The range of work is bewildering” said Sansom, “dozens of books on various uplifting and instructive topics and themes.”

Author and literary reviewer Elizabeth Hawksley confirms that Arthur Mee “is now almost forgotten but, in his time, I think it is fair to say that everybody knew him.”

Hawksley believes Mee’s “greatest talent” was stimulating his readers’ imaginations in ways that “kept them coming back for more.”

No wonder they returned for seconds! In his introduction to his Book of One Thousand Beautiful Things Mee tantalised: “In these pages are poems that will never die, thoughts that have come to us down the centuries, words that fill the air with music when they are said aloud, pictures we all love to see, gems of craftsmanship from artists who love beauty and have served it well, sculptures that adorn the galleries of the world...acts and deeds showing life at its sweetest and rarest and best.”

And this was just one of his dozens of books.

He also published The Children’s Newspaper between 1919 and 1964 which according to Hawksley was “read across the Empire.”

Each of its 2,397 weekly editions “was edited by Mee from its first publication until his death in 1943,” Ian Sansom wrote in his 2007 Guardian article, adding, “despite competition from comics such as the Beano and the Dandy...and, later, the Eagle, the newspaper steadily sold 500,000 copies a week.”

So who was its ‘incredibly prolific’ wordsmith?

He was the second son of a devout Baptist railwayman who was a deacon in the Baptist church.

Arthur started noting down his father’s sermons and publishing them in the local newspaper, which offered him indentures as a journalist - before he’d turned 14 years old.

He was extremely ambitious and by the time he was in his early 20s Arthur had established himself in London’s printing and publishing community, where he was ‘discovered’ in 1905 by Dublin-born Alfred Charles William Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Northcliffe, a British newspaper and publishing magnate.

Lord Northcliff employed Arthur as editor of his Harmsworth Self-Educator, where he edited 48 fortnightly issues, each of 136 pages, covering a breathtakingly wide range of topics.

It would be easier to list what he didn’t cover, but here’s a tiny selection - agriculture, art and architecture; chemistry and physics; housekeeping, food and dress; the history of the world; how tonsils are removed with a pair of scissors; bone and ivory carving; telephone pole construction and wiring; practical taxidermy; making felt hats; constructing the Panama Canal - limitless themes, vast topics, distilled into small separate chapters.

After the Harmsworth Self-Educator came the Harmsworth History of the World and then Mee embarked on his famous Children’s Encyclopaedia in 1908, a multi-volume children’s version of the Self-Educator.

A modern review describes the Children’s Encyclopaedia as “a wee bit like surfing the internet” and the themes of his numerous books were similarly limitless, from ‘Defeat or Victory?’ (1917) about WWI to his ‘Golden Year’ (1922) recalling his summer holidays to ‘1,000 Heroes: Immortal Men and Women of Every Age and Every Land’ (1933) to his ‘Blackout Book’ (1939) full of stories, games and puzzles.

“Faster than imagination this world is moving on,” he wrote in ‘Arthur Mee’s Golden Year’ and he got closer than most to keeping up.