ABSTRACT
They must have been the best investments Northcliffe ever made, star performers who reaped record-breaking profits for the firm. Mee’s greatest contribution was the Children’s Encyclopedia, which Hammerton called an inexhaustible source of income for the firm, though he also compiled and edited other notable Harmsworth ventures in popular education. Hammerton, described in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography as ‘The most successful creator of large-scale works of reference that Britain has known’, was proudest of his Harmsworth’s Universal Encyclopedia.3 Issued in fortnightly parts from 1920 until 1922, it sold 12 million copies throughout the English-speaking world and was translated into six languages. He also edited compilations of ‘wonders’ in most subjects (a very popular selling line in the early decades of the twentieth century), other encyclopedias, war books, memoirs and gazetteers – one of his few commercial failures was The World’s Great Books in Outline, in which, with Mee, he reduced about a thousand books to six volumes, published in fortnightly parts. In addition, Hammerton’s memoir of Mee, Child of Wonder (1946), is almost the only firsthand account that we have of his life and work.
