Somehow it’s July! June seems to have gone by very fast, and now it’s the school holidays. This week we are going to sign up for the library’s summer reading challenge and we are going to try to visit all 14 libraries and get a stamp at each!
I’ve lived in Dundee all my life and worked for the libraries for almost 7 years but have never set foot in 7 of the libraries – that’s half of them! I’ll let you all know how we get on.
Now libraries and Enid Blyton haven’t always gotten on but I’ve just started wondering if she ever wrote about visiting or borrowing books from one. I can’t think of anything off the top of my head but surely she must have, at some point! If you can think of any examples put them in the comments below!
June round up
and
Letters to Enid 33
Talking of libraries having Googled Enid Blyton and library one of my old posts came up. It was 15th in the results which isn’t bad at all! (I knew those search terms were terrible as of course they brought up a) all the collections of books called little libraries etc and b) articles about Blyton being banned at libraries, but I did it anyway…)
So far, from that list, I have read the Adventure Series TV novels (terrible), a few of the Malory Towers continuations (not very good), the Naughtiest Girl continuations (terrible), Holiday Stories (good, because it is 90-95% what Blyton originally wrote), Bizzy and the Bedtime Bear (terrible), and Real Fairies (wonderful).
That’s a poor success rate on enjoyment but being library books they didn’t cost me a penny.
Fiona
pippastef
worldofblyton
World of Blyton 
I can’t think of anyone ever going to a public library in the major series and more well-known standalone novels (though maybe I’m just not remembering it – and I haven’t read the Secret Seven for ages). I don’t know most of the short stories though.
The school library is mentioned several times in Second Form at St. Clare’s.
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I’ve done a search in the Kindle edition of the Secret Seven. I’ve found (exactly) one time, though they’re not going there for books.
In Go Ahead, Secret Seven, Chapter “Jobs for everyone”:
“They all went out of the shed, Scamper too, wagging his tail importantly. Pam and Barbara decided to go after school to the public library, where there were many papers they could read for Lost and Found advertisements. So, much to the librarian’s astonishment, they seated themselves there, with copies of the daily papers and of the local papers too, around them.”
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Good detective work!
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Given the modern horrors of political correctness, I was amused to discover that the reason why Enid Blyton was banned by the BBC for nearly 30 years during her lifetime was because the corporation thought she was a “second-rater” whose work lacked literary value.
I’d far rather discuss her works on their merits, so that seems not such a bad reason for a ban. This feeds into the bigger topic of 1950s BBC snobbery, whereby any children’s author who was not Lewis Carrol or Robert Louis Stevenson was seen by the Corporation as ‘lowbrow’ and thus as a legitimate target for a good kicking.
To the best of my knowledge, Petersfield doesn’t have a public library. Given that it is so big a “village” that it has its own hotel, which Fatty’s parents are living in during the first Find-Outers book, and its own police station, and its own aristocracy (Lady Candling, in the second book), and its own theatre (in ‘Pantomime Cat’), and its own Bakery (‘Invisible Thief’), it seems odd to have no library. Do we even know if it has a newsagents? Spinner-racks in the local papershop were where I used to find Blyton paperbacks in our village, in the 1970s, as the village had no library.
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It does seem odd for Peterswood not to have a library, given it’s other amenities (though some of those seem to appear and disappear as the plots require!) but perhaps it does have one, it is just never visited by the children? After all, they’re all wealthy enough to have any books they want bought for them.
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