The Curious Boy's Book of Adventure

Subtitled ‘100 High Jinks & Escapades’ and with a self-consciously retro cover and production, this is a handbook ‘for boys who want real adventure’. Real adventures include finding North without a compass, building a tree house, cooking up slime, playing conkers and training your dog. Oh.

Reasonably competent and largely explicit instructions are given for these and other adventurous pursuits; occasionally, though, they’re over-optimistic. The tyro treehouse builder is blithely told to cut a boy-sized hole in a sheet of one inch ply, without further instructions; that’s a challenge for any woodworker, let alone an under-informed beginner. Most of the content here was better expressed and illustrated in my 1926 Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopaedia. ‘Children’s’, notice, not ‘Boy’s’ – Arthur recognised what Sam doesn’t – that girls can have adventures too.

It’s as well, then, that the print is so lamentably small that only the most curious of boys will bother with it. Mr Martin is American, refers to soil as ‘dirt’ and has two (doubtlessly curious) sons called ‘Ford’ and ‘Wren’. Truly it is another country, they do things differently there. And it’s where this book should have stayed.