Category Archives: Greyfriars – Billy Bunter

The Magnet, a story paper for boys, was published weekly from 1908 until 1940. In its early years, it was published in a red cover each week: hence the early period, before about 1920, is known as the Red Magnet … Continue reading →

I always thought that Billy Bunter lacked his father’s head for business. Mr Samuel Bunter was of course a stockbroker. Billy Bunter’s only interest in business was monkey business! However, I’ve recently been converted to the idea that Billy had … Continue reading →

George Samways wrote the following piece about “substitute writers”. Samways was himself a substitute writer: that’s to say, he wrote Greyfriars tales for The Magnet each week if the main author, Frank Richards (Charles Hamilton), hadn’t sent in a story … Continue reading →

The 38 post-war “Billy Bunter” novels published between 1947 and 1965 (digitised in a mixture of .epub, .pdf, .prc and .mobi formats) can be read online: https://ulozto.net/hledej?q=%22Frank+Richards%22

Bill Howard Baker began publishing his hardback facsimilie reprints of issues of The Magnet in 1969, twenty nine years after that story paper had ceased publication due to the wartime paper shortage in 1940. Perhaps it was not entirely a … Continue reading →

In the Enid Blyton books, the newer Blyton covers are horrible, so I was wondering how on earth anybody in their right senses approved them, and I wondered, too, about how Blyton’s text has been modified to be politically correct. … Continue reading →

When I read the Greyfriars tales in The Magnet, I like to read also the editorial pages that give reader feedback, not just the latest Greyfriars tale itself. The impression I get is that the young readers of long ago … Continue reading →

I don’t think the Professor who recently suggested, in a newspaper article, that fat children should read Charles Hamilton’s Greyfriars stories was under any misunderstanding. As always, it’s necessary to study carefully the context in which the article was written: … Continue reading →

[An article on how early Charles Hamilton tales about Greyfriars and Billy Bunter – published in The Magnet under the pen name Frank Richards – seem to have been written by a much older, more Victorian man than his later … Continue reading →