Arthur Knowles Sabin

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Arthur Knowles Sabin (1879–1959) was a British writer, poet and printer. He is best known for developing the Bethnal Green Museum in London, which is now part of the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Museum of Childhood.

Life
- Sabin was born in Rotherham in 1879, the son of a Sheffield steel worker. He was largely self-educated and married Elizabeth Thompson in 1903.
- He moved to Cranleigh, Surrey, where he wrote poems and joined the Samurai Press, which had been started in Norwich by Harold Browne and Harold Monro; the press moved to Cranleigh in 1906.
- In 1909 he became Keeper at the Victoria and Albert Museum and bought a house at 14 Palmerston Road in East Sheen. There he set up a small printing press in a shed, issuing books and pamphlets under the Temple Sheen Press imprint.
- In 1922 he was appointed curator of the Bethnal Green Museum, leaving East Sheen. He began collecting toys and other childhood items to make the museum more engaging for children, with support from Queen Mary and Mary Greg. He remained in this post until 1940.
- Sabin died in 1959.

Literary output
- Typhon and other Poems (1902)
- The Death of Icarus and Other Poems, together with a new translation in terza rima from the Purgatory of Dante (Canto XXVIII) (1906)
- The Wayfarers (1907)
- The rustic choir and other poems (1908)
- Dante and Beatrice (1908)
- Medea and Circe, and other poems, with an introduction by Richard G. Moulton (1911)
- War Harvest 1914 (1914)
- Christmas 1914 (1914)
- New poems (1915)
- War posters issued by belligerent and neutral nations 1914–1919 (1920; with Martin Hardie)
- East London Poems and others (1931)

Sabin was also responsible for several catalogues at the Victoria and Albert Museum and Bethnal Green Museum.