Like practically every human relationship these days, fatherhood has become horribly institutionalised. A condition that was once thoroughly ad hoc and made up as one went along is now caught up in bureaucracy’s stifling grasp.

Father’s Day (an American import that didn’t exist in my youth), fathers’ support agencies, parenting classes: on all sides comes evidence of a natural state hedged about with all kind of wholly artificial supports.

What my own father would have made of this during my late 1960s and early 1970s childhood I can’t begin to imagine. As far as I can deduce he simply got on with the task in hand, inspected the school reports and was at all times available for advice and consolation. Asked to theorise about it, he would probably have laughed in your face. A Father’s Day card would have been hooted out of the house.

Judging by the hot story from the UK book trade a good many fathers still share that view.

Every so often the lofty minarets of publishing find themselves shaken by a seismic crack from down below. The sound — deeply liberating in the age of the pre-digested blockbuster — is that of the book-buying public spontaneously making its presence felt: one of those infrequent but hugely intriguing instances of word-of-mouth buzz picking up on some hitherto under-publicised item and sending it storming up the bestseller list without the people who administer the book trade really noticing.

The latest example of this encouraging trend is a work entitled The Dangerous Book For Boys by the brothers Conn and Hal Iggulden — Conn is a well-known historical novelist — which was overlooked by the literary editors and the three-for-two promotions but is currently number one on the Amazon chart.

Undoubtedly it is being bought not only by boys but by their fathers as a splendidly politically incorrect guide to both boyhood and fatherhood.

Got up in gilt and scarlet covers, stoutly hardbacked and looking for all the world like a juvenile Christmas present from around the time of King Edward VII’s coronation, The Dangerous Book For Boys declares its intent from the opening page.

“In this age of video games and mobile phones there must still be a place for knots, tree houses and stories of incredible courage,” the authors maintain. “Men and boys today are the same as they always were, and interested in the same things . . . We hope in years to come that this will be a book to dig out of the attic and give to a couple of kids staring at a pile of wood and wondering what to do with it.”

There follow nearly 300 neatly written pages on such enticing topics as Hunting and Cooking a Rabbit, Understanding Grammar (in three parts, this one), A Brief History of Artillery and even a section on an entity that would have been zealously excluded from the Edwardian original — Girls.

Halfway between an act of homage to a bygone era and a thoroughly practical “how to” guide — having promised the children a treehouse years ago I read that particular tranche with the sinking realisation that something would probably have to be done — the Igguldens’ book is, however unobtrusively, making a fairly dramatic claim: “Men and boys today are the same as they always were.”

Are they? My six-year-old, however cosseted and protected from the wicked world outside, looks to me like a miniature adult, absurdly well informed about the latest computer gizmos and able to discuss football with the statistical nous of a man of 30. (“Why doesn’t Scholes still play for England,” he demanded during the Trinidad & Tobago game on Thursday night. “He’s only 31.”)

So what, I wondered, would children, as opposed to the moist-eyed paternal elegist, make of these expositions of the Battle of Waterloo or the thumbnail guides to coleoptera?