The Enid Blyton Society

For the benefit of those who only ever look at the Forums, I thought I would repeat here the News item that I have just listed on the main site.
Keith has been beavering away and our Book Listing section now has 317 books in it and with another section well on its way this number is set to more than double in the near future. Where books contain short stories, they are all listed and it is also possible to see where the story was first published or if it has been specially written for the book. Although you will find other Blyton Book Listings on the internet, this one is the only one which has a search facility and I hope it will prove useful to all users.

At present we have 68 books reviewed, but main series such as the School series and the Famous Five still have no reviews - I am sure that we have some literate scribes on these Forums who might be able to help.

Best wishes
Tony

Amazing stuff, Tony! This must have meant a great deal of work for both you and Keith - thanks so much. Everything is beautifully arranged and it's brilliant to see all those cover scans. I'm getting very excited about the forthcoming "short stories" section!

Anita

It looks really great!
Thanks to both of you for all your hard work and for letting us know!

No F5 review?!?!?!?!

Good Lord!

Well, erm, there's my poem summarising all the books which you're welcome to use as a stop gap, and if it's still outstanding when I've got the time to turn around I'll write a few reviews

Tony - have to agree with the others - excellent work. Thank you.

I've just had a 'proper' look at the book listing section, and I have to say it's fantastic Well done.

I realise everyone else has said pretty much the same, but really.....

All those book covers.

And the number of links that must have been created so that the books can be accessed by so many different routes. I'd have thought Keith must have been pretty dizzy after all that lot

Thank you very much.

Viking Star wrote:...And the number of links that must have been created so that the books can be accessed by so many different routes. I'd have thought Keith must have been pretty dizzy after all that lot

Thanks, but I think it must be Tony's head that's spinning, not mine! And even though the vast number of interconnected links between pages looks dizzying at first glance, actually it's not that complicated because the whole thing is databased -- so it's not like I've had to go through hand coding all those links. If I had, we would have something like 750 pages. But with a database and "dynamic" links we actually only have about ten pages.

The latest update is that in addition to the novels/novelettes and character books, we now have a new section containing all the short story series books (an extra 384 books added to the system). This brings the grand total up (so far) to 701 books, with 4064 short stories.

See the Book Listing page for more stats and, of course, the new books! The short stories are still being added; poor Tony probably has another 20 million to work through.

Simply wizard!

Love some of the story titles, like "The Old Man in the Tram" and "The Mad Teapot." Don't think "Hello Sooty-Face" would go down too well these days!

Keep up the brilliant work!

Anita

Anita Bensoussane wrote:Don't think "Hello Sooty-Face" would go down too well these days!

What a coincidence you mentioned this one - I read it yesterday! I was thinking myself while reading it that it wouldn't be too PC now.

Keith Robinson wrote:...actually it's not that complicated

Oh, don't be so modest! It's a genius design and you know it. I certainly couldn't condense the 750 pages down to ten!

But of course, HUGE thanks to Tony for doing all the ground work and working his scanning finger to the bone! Oh, and thanks Anita for all the great reviews that are featured in the books section too - you notice so much stuff that I just skim straight past!

Holy God! Honestly, what a most brilliant book-listing. I had been waiting for this for ages and now its come!
I wanted to ask that why did Award Publications change the names of the books? And did Blyton ever write some short-stories about the Famous Five. I just heard about them from somewhere but I can't find them!
Thanks

Hi Mohamed,

Yes, Enid Blyton wrote the following short stories about the Famous Five:

Five Have a Puzzling Time
George's Hair is Too Long!
Good Old Timmy!
A Lazy Afternoon
Well Done, Famous Five!
Five and a Half-Term Adventure
Happy Christmas, Five!
When Timmy Chased the Cat!

They were originally published in various annuals etc, but in 1995 all eight stories were collected together in a Red Fox paperback edition called Five Have a Puzzling Time and Other Stories.

Not quite sure what you mean about the different titles of the Award books. New publishers frequently re-title collections of short stories to make them look like a series, and they often put together different combinations of stories.

Anita

Thanks a lot for informing me, Anita. I am indeed very greatful to you

It is our intention to have short stories as well as books showing up on any search and we are working on it now (well actually Keith is and I'm just messing things up!), but currently if you stick Famous Five into Search you will see five of these short stories - as yet the books with the others in aren't listed.

You're not messing things up, Tony, just doing the logical thing with the current system.

The titles Tony mentioned currently have the keywords "Famous Five" in the title, such as "A Lazy Afternoon [Famous Five]." But these keywords ideally shouldn't be in the title, and I'm working on expanding the system so that we can add keywords in the background, ie, so the keywords aren't visible in the title.

This means we'll be able to add any number of keywords as we see fit. For instance, we could add character names, and in the future we could do a search on "Jack" and see how many books pop up with that character's name! Bet they'll be a fair few...

If you haven't checked already, the search tool now picks up titles for short stories and poems. Try it out. Look for "amelia jane" and you'll find 4 book titles and 45 short story titles. (And try "famous five" for Tony's temporary keyword-stuffed titles!)

The Book Listing is stupendous, but it does show up the deficiencies in the paperback editions of some of the short story books. I'd noticed before, when looking through Tony's Illustrated Bibliographies, that many of my paperback versions of books like The Green Story Book, Eight O' Clock Tales etc (some of which are early 1970s Dragons) have several stories missing. That's very disappointing. How dare publishers censor our reading like that!

Anita