Robert, my history with Blyton goes back to the fall of 1965. That's when I started collecting suspenseful EB books.
When I finally had access to the Internet at work in 1998, I was doing private research on so many other things (mostly classic US TV series like "Peyton Place", there was a gorgeous British website on PP which doesn't exist any longer) that EB was for a while on the back burner (right term?).
Even though I never stopped reading EB books, I went through phases where other things were more important for a while. But in the end I always returned to reading EB
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I didn't find out about Tony and EBS before the summer of 2008 when my husband André worked in the UK. He knows (and supports) my fascination with EB books, did some research on the Internet and found the Yahoo Enid Blyton Group for me. That was in August 2008 when I came to the UK to stay with André for 4 months.
I joined Yahoo EB Group right away and THEN at some point heard about EBS.
It took me a few years before I joined EBS (the rather difficult registering process kept me post-poning it, André was working a lot in Algeria now (so I had no technical help at home) plus when we finally had enough time to go through the registering he had a hard time creating my EBS avatar as it has to have a certain size/pixels).
Don't know exactly WHEN I finally found out about the EBS Journal, but my guess is 2012 or 2013 (in any case Ilsa gave me 10 or 11 EBS Journals when we met at the Spade Oak last year and that got me really interested). At first in 2012 or 2013 I didn't have a real clear idea what the journal is all about, so I didn't pay much attention to it. As a matter of fact, I was busy for many many months just finding old threads about the FF and the Adventure series on EBS and also was thrilled with discovering "new" EB books like "The Hollow Tree House" and "The Secret Island". I barely found the time to catch up on new threads, because I was busy reading old threads.
So this is my own EBS Journal story and maybe other new members didn't find out about the journal for similar reasons?
I guess that everybody has a different reason for joining EBS, many people want to interact with other forumites, others want to sell their EB collections or do research on EB etc.
Wish English would be my native language and I could get to the point in a better way. But this is as good as I can explain why it took me years to become aware of the journal.
Before that my only way of looking up EB books was Barbara Stoney's EB biography (1974) which I ordered in 1978 from the UK through a German bookstore which took many weeks and I had to pay about 3 times as much as I would have paid for it in England.
My first trip to England was in May 1981. At the beginning of our trip we visited Beaconsfield (we stayed for a few nights at the Whitbread Hotel and took the train to London).
In London I ordered all 8 hardcover copies from the Adventure series at Boyle's in London (what an amazing, huge bookstore!) and 3 weeks later picked them up, before we took the ferry back to Calais.