Abstract
I am a hoarder of books. Even when I get as far as filling a box to take to a charity shop, its contents have a way of creeping back onto my bookshelves before I have got around to delivering them. Some time ago, my wife gently suggested that I was now perhaps of an age to dispense with my ten volumes of Arthur Mee's Children's encyclopedia, which she had not seen me read for the past forty years. Thinking quickly, I assured her that I had been meaning for some time to examine how it presented mathematics to its young readers. And so, at last, I have …