Inflation for Beginners #2 But his most enduring legacy is the series of books he wrote describing the mythical adventures of Mr Tompkins, a mild-mannered bank clerk who has vivid dreams in which he visits the world of the very small, inside the atom, and the world of the very large, the Universe itself. Although they first appeared in the 1940s, they still provide an excellent and entertaining guide to basic physics. Many readers seem to agree -- the collected edition was reprinted in England every single year during the 1980s, and has just been republished in English with a new foreword by Roger Penrose, one of the founding fathers of black hole theory.