Happy 100th birthday, Winnie the Pooh. May your cake be full of honey. For you must be the most famous teddy bear in the world.

Actually, nobody can agree exactly when your birthday is. For some it’s August 2, 1921, when Christopher Robin got his teddy bear as a birthday present. He named him Winnie the Pooh and they became inseparable friends.

For others, the date is Christmas Eve, 1925, when the first Pooh story by Christopher’s father, A. A. Milne, appeared in the London Evening News. But for most it’s October 14, 1926, when the first Pooh book, Winnie-the-Pooh, was published.

The adventures of The Bear of Very Little Brain and his friends – Piglet, Eeyore, Owl, Rabbit, Kanga and Roo, and later Tigger – in the enchanted Hundred Acre Wood have delighted generations of children. They kindle nostalgic memories in parents and grandparents. They are treasured by book collectors. And they are still inspiring writers and illustrators of children’s books. The only person who doesn’t like Pooh is Chinese President Xi Jinping, who keeps on censoring satirical memes comparing him to the tubby bear.

Birthday celebrations are under way in Ashdown Forest, East Sussex (home of the Hundred Acre Wood, Christopher Robin’s playground) and in places as far-flung as Boston Children’s Museum, the National WWI Museum in Kansas City and the New York Public Library, where Pooh and his stuffed toy friends sit on display behind bulletproof glass. Roo is missing, but Queen Camilla recently presented the library with a bespoke replica.

In a long and prolific career, Milne wrote many successful plays, books, essays and humorous articles. But today he’s remembered for just four books: Winnie-the-Pooh, The House at Pooh Corner, and his two volumes of verse for children, When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six, which introduced Pooh and Christopher Robin. They were bestsellers on four continents and were translated into more than 80 languages, including Latin.

Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, published about the same time, sold 20,000 copies in its first year. Winnie-the-Pooh sold 150,000 copies in less than three months. Sales since then are estimated at somewhere between 50 million and 100 million copies.

Collectors pay big money for Pooh. British bibliographer Dr Philip Errington, with rare booksellers Peter Harrington, is bringing first editions of the four Pooh books, signed by illustrator Ernest Shepard, to the Melbourne Rare Book Fair, from Thursday, July 30 to Saturday, August 1. They are valued at £10,000 (about $19,000).

Also on display will be an original preliminary drawing in colour of Pooh in Owl’s parlour, which Shepard created for an omnibus edition of Pooh stories. It’s valued at £60,000. In his days as an auctioneer, Errington sold an original drawing of the Hundred Acre Wood for £430,000, the highest price ever paid for a book illustration at auction.

Walt Disney began to buy rights to the Pooh franchise in 1961, and since then, we’ve been swamped with films, spinoff books and masses of merchandise. These days, the Pooh empire is worth more than $5 billion a year.

Errington doesn’t mind Disney; he thinks the animated versions are respectful to the originals. But he’s sad that Disney used its own songwriting team, the Sherman brothers, to set Pooh’s hums to music.

The original music was written by Harold Fraser Simson, Milne’s neighbour in Chelsea. Actor Norman Shelley (famous for impersonating Winston Churchill) did Pooh’s voice on BBC radio, and the young Christopher Robin’s voice was recorded on disc for some of the songs.

What is the secret of Pooh’s long life and eternal appeal? Errington puts it down to three things: “Milne is an incredible writer. His background is the theatre and his dialogue is exquisite. This is a dramatist who knows his characters.”

Then there are Shepard’s iconic drawings. “They are beautifully executed. There’s movement in them, an incredible sense of line.”

Finally, there is the collaboration between author and artist. “Milne was very lucky to find Shepard. I challenge anyone to come up with another combination between writer and artist whose works are inseparable.”

Some of the 750,000 people who come to the New York Public Library every year to see Pooh are puzzled that he looks so different from the drawings. That’s because Shepard took as his model his own son’s teddy bear, Growler.

Another reflection on Pooh’s popularity comes from Gyles Brandreth, who has written Somewhere, A Boy and a Bear, a biography of Milne and Pooh. Milne “created a world unlike any other – a world of good humour and good heart, a world of warmth and kindness and generosity,” he writes. The Pooh books “are our passport to that world”.

What delights me about the books are the little failures and foibles of each creature that make them human. Appearances are everything: everyone is constantly making up stories to save face, to demonstrate abilities, wisdom or courage they don’t really possess, all to impress Christopher Robin.

Pooh is not all sweetness. His craving for honey makes him come up with excuses that would make an addict proud. But his saving grace is his honesty and modesty. He knows he isn’t clever, and if anything, he underestimates his talents. I love his ponderous logic: “Pooh, who felt more and more that he was somewhere else, got up slowly and began to look for himself.”

Pooh and friends have fascinated psychologists and philosophers. The Canadian Medical Association once said the characters embodied various neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders. The Tao of Pooh, by Benjamin Hoff, uses the stories to introduce Western readers to the principles of Taoism. And there’s a new book out soon, Winnie the Pooh: 100 Mindful Moments, in which Pooh and friends lead you towards greater balance and peace. Turns out the Bear of Very Little Brain is wise.

So let’s hear it: Happy Birthday, Winnie the Pooh. Or as Owl so wisely writes, HIPY PAPY BTHUTHDTH THUTHDA BTHUTHDY.

Jane Sullivan will give a talk on the Winnie the Pooh centenary as part of Melbourne Rare Book Week at the East Melbourne Library at 6pm on Tuesday July 28. A 100th birthday party will be held at Melbourne’s narrm ngarrgu Library on Thursday, July 30. Bring your own bear.

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