Maybe it’s just me, but I really love discovering old things that just don’t make sense, are plain wrong, or just have been forgotten.

I’ve been working my way through a box of The Children’s Encyclopedia which we think were my grandparents – the earliest was published in 1908, and to put that in perspective, that was eight years before the Great War and five years before my 94 year old grandmother was born. They will be 100 next year.

So it’s brilliant to flip through this century-old youth magazine. The encyclopedia was originally distributed as periodicals and is not alphabetically organised. It simply covers topics and answers questions that that the readers might ask – including cartoons, but also including serious observations on the world. It’s more of a magazine than a true reference book.

The first article I came across (from 1911) explained that a friend of the editor (Arthur Mee) had recently written a book explaining why it is no longer possible for wars to occur. Apparently the complex nature of credit arrangements between countries would mean that it would become financially impossible. I think it’s fair to say that being optimistic isn’t necessarily the same as being correct.

An offshoot of the encyclopedia was the establishment (with regular head count) of the League of The Helping Hand. This organisation was setup and promoted by Mee, and it boasted a scout-like structure open to both boys and girls. In 1911, there were ‘Bands’ of this League in the UK, Italy and the USA amongst others, and the members of each band would appoint Captains and award Knighthoods to each other for particularly good work. Very imperial. I’ve just discovered it’s still in existence, but now as a registered charity.

There is a lot of other interesting stuff that is fascinatingly well past it’s sell by date, and sheds light on a world that still didn’t yet have wall sockets, women had no vote, where ‘Titanic’ was just a collection of drawings and where most of the readers were born during the reign of Queen Victoria. Probably the most poignant observations are the regularly appearing collages and montages of readers’ photos which record the faces of hundreds of kids who would sadly never live to see the start of the 1920s.

I’ve been scanning in some of the pages to see if I can make any future use of it before the books are disposed of. The image above demonstrates the future of train travel as imagined in 1911 – on a single track using gyroscopic mounts which “will keep the train so steady that we shall be able to write while travelling, or even to play billiards”. I’m still waiting to play snooker on a Virgin Pendalino.