Hello everyone! Thanks for all the responses. Your comments are much appreciated.
I have checked
The Wishing Chair Collection again, and can confirm the following, regarding content:
The Adventures of the Wishing Chair would appear to be the same as the 1971 Dean & Son edition - ie 26 chapters - chapter 1: The Strange Old Shop; chapter 26: The Snoogle's Castle, with all the same chapters in between. (I say "would appear" because I haven't checked the content word for word.)
The Wishing Chair Again would also appear to be the same as the 1972 Dean & Son edition - ie 25 chapters: chapter 1: Home for the Holidays; chapter 25: Home Again - And Goodbye! - again with all the same chapters in between.
In response to Anita's query,
More Wishing Chair Tales contains the following 17 chapters:
1 The Witch's Cat (6)
2 The Dear-Me Goblin (7)
3 The Adventure of the Green Enchanter (8) (eight) (for some reason I got a smiley when I typed the number eight)
4 Peter's Own Adventure (9)
5 The Old, Old Man (11)
6 Topsy-Turvy Land (12)
7 The Chair Runs Away Again (13)
8 The Land of Scally-Wags (14)
9 The Prince's Spells (15)
10 The Last Adventure of All (-)
11 Home for Half-Term (1)
12 Cree-ee-eak (2)
13 An Adventurous Night (3)
14 Land of Wishes (4)
15 Santa Claus and the Wishing Chair (5)
16 More About the Wishing Chair (-)
17 The End of the Adventure (-)
(The number in brackets is the chapter number in the Mammoth book
More Wishing Chair Stories to which Anita has referred.)
So the main points to emerge are:
1. Most of the chapters are the same as the Mammoth edition but the chapter order is significantly different! Surely Mammoth is correct here? ie Dean's chapter 11 "Home for Half-Term" should be the first chapter, followed by chapters 12-15, then chapters 1-10.
2. The Dean edition contains three chapters not in the Mammoth edition, namely 10 The Last Adventure of All; 16 More About the Wishing Chair; and 17 The End of the Adventure.
3. The Dean edition does not include chapter 10 from the Mammoth edition, The Disappearing Land. (I guess this may be the same story as chapter 10 of the 1971 edition of
The Adventures of the Wishing Chair called "The Disappearing Island"? If so, that would explain why Dean left it out.)
So that leaves me with the following questions:
1. Tony says there are 67 individual chapters, but on the above analysis, you end up with 68! Another puzzle! (And another guess - that the story Tony refers to called "The Wishing Chair Again" is reproduced as chapters 16 and 17 of
More Wishing Chair Tales - with the name of chapter 16 changed because it clashes with the title of the second Wishing Chair book.)
2. Which is the "correct" order of the chapters for
More Wishing Chair Tales? Mammoth would seem to be correct in the order of their compilation - but for completeness they should have added "The Last Adventure of All" and then probably the last two chapters from Dean.
best wishes
booklover