Chum was a British boy’s weekly which, at the end of the year was bound into a single huge book and the following Christmas parents bought it as Christmas presents for male children.

Van Vogt is describing a now-obscure practice in British juvenile publishing: weekly story papers marketed to boys were often gathered into annual volumes and sold as substantial gift books at Christmas. The remark is less a literary aphorism than a piece of cultural memory, pointing to how serialized popular fiction was repackaged into a prestigious, durable object—transforming ephemeral weekly entertainment into a “proper” book suitable for parental purchase and holiday ritual. Implicitly, it also gestures toward the gendered assumptions of the period’s children’s reading market and the way material format (binding, size, timing) shaped what counted as an acceptable present and as respectable reading.