Children's poets visit schools and we know that children love poetry.
But there were also humorous rhymes and couplets, many by authors like Thomas Hood, Charles H Ross and Ernest Warren, all well known journalists, writers and poets.
Those poets put me in touch with novelists and eventually playwrights.
The stories that follow are based on interviews with four successful young British artists – working as actors, poets, playwrights, painters – who grew up in Muslim communities.
Back in our office, famous poets would often come in for meetings with the director, which was exciting for us, as we had made up songs about most of them.
When the actual prize-giving began, it turned out that two of the judges – highly respected poets who had won several awards themselves – had gone awol.
And, thanks to a large student population and a strong cultural legacy (two of the nation's poets, Rubén Darío and Alfonso Cortés, are from the city), León has a vibrant intellectual life.
This will manifest itself in a year-long programme of events and activities, including the launch of the world's first solar-powered hot-air balloon, a 30m walk-in blue whale sculpture – to be made by locals from recycled materials – and a cultural festival that will invite writers, artists, filmmakers, poets and architects to take part.
In the 1930s, they even gave name to a school of poetry – Cyril Connolly referred to the youthful, leftwing poets WH Auden, Cecil Day-Lewis, Louis MacNeice and Stephen Spender as the "Pylon boys" for their self-conscious use of modern technology; Spender's poem The Pylons was published in 1933: "those pillars," he wrote, "bare like nude giant girls that have no secret".
The combatants included the poets Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon and Sheers's own great great uncle, William Cross.
The reader might take issue with the editors' claim that the railway is "as close as earthly things get to perfection" – as indeed do many of the poets and songwriters on board – but there are plenty of nostalgic pleasures to be had here.
