How to be Topp

 was a book that Coal Hill student John Brent liked. It was written by Geoffrey Williams and illustrated by Ronald Searle.

Inside the book, a picture was captioned, "every skool hav a resident buly who is fat". According to Susan Foreman, the boy depicted in the picture looked just like Francis Minto, a bully at Coal Hill. (PROSE: Time and Relative)

Behind the scenes
In the real world, How to be Topp was written by, not "Williams". This may have been a poke at the intentional bad spelling in the book.