In the days before Google, when encyclopaediae poured down the pipe like Cadbury chocolates, way before their current status as the most unwanted and heaviest thing at the Regent Theatre Book Sale, there were two leaders of the pack - the Encyclopaedia Britannica and Arthur Mee's Children's Encyclopaedia.
Aspiring middle-class families who wanted their children to be doctors and lawyers tended to favour the Britannica, even though it was incomprehensible to all but the very brightest children.
And doctors and lawyers.
Complicated and long-wordy to a fault, it made all school projects clearly The Work Of Others, and the much simpler Arthur Mee volumes enjoyed massive popularity.
Published from 1910 to 1965, Arthur Mee's Children's Encyclopaedia was even translated into Chinese.
We were a Britannica family, even though none of us three kids ever read a word of it.
I have mentioned before in this column why, but the story bears repeating, for it hangs in my blood to this very day like a festering unfixable open wound that even leeches would not touch: we were offered a television or a Britannica and we all voted for the telly, so our father bought the Britannica.
This is the kind of thinking that continues to this day in the National Government, where referendums are treated like errant lint on an unattended sleeve.
But I savagely digress.
I always wondered what the Arthur Mee encyclopaedia was like, and last week my Personal Shopper, Dorothy, produced Volume Four from an undated edition.
Possibly early 1960s.
There is a photo of a computer the size of the Octagon on Page 2717, which talks proudly of its 12,500 electronic tubes and 21,400 relays.
''By adding and subtracting electrical impulses, it can multiply numbers and store the result in its mechanical memory and reply in a week's time.''
That was life in the early 1960s.
Arthur Mee first earned real money by reading Parliamentary reports to the blind at just 14.
Metaphorically he would continue doing this for the rest of his life.
Ironically, he had no affinity with children, and was much more intent on producing a highly moral and patriotic nation.
The white race was deemed totally superior, and his Baptist upbringing and temperance sympathies soon saw him taking a white-knuckled stand on alcohol.
Herein lies Volume Four's most spectacular writing.
Beneath a Bacchanalian picture of men and women with wobbly legs raising tumblers, an image querulously close to what one could photograph on a cellphone today during Orientation Week in Castle St, there is a searing three-page essay entitled Alcohol, The Enemy Of Life.
If you can excuse the shocking writing, bear with the message: ''The British nation spends every year millions of pounds on alcohol for drinking. It is a terrible and almost incredible truth; the evidence of all impartial investigators is that, so far as any useful result is concerned, the whole of this vast amount is absolutely thrown away. If we threw it into the sea every year we should be a thousand times better off. As it is, we buy death, disease, crime, poverty, insanity, cruelty to children, bad workmanship and danger to life and the State. There is no form of life, animal or vegetable, that this poison will not destroy.''
After scientifically proving alcohol doesn't keep you warm, like Antarctic explorers thought, Mee moves to the importance of the thumb, and how its massive degree of movement can be cut short by the demon drink.
A rational man would then discuss hitch-hiking, sober or drunk, but Mee irrationally leaps sideways and points out the Panama Canal was built by abstainers.
Here I tip my hat in academic reverence, because if one thing is clear when you see the Panama Canal, it is that it has been built by a succession of extraordinarily healthy thumbs.
All of which is just a convoluted way of saying Merry Christmas, because this is the first time I have ever had a column day falling on Christmas Eve.
And, please, don't drink too much.
• Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
