I was just checking to see if I had written about all the Blyton birthday/Christmas presents and as it turns out, no I haven’t. So let’s remedy that.

Tell-A-Story Books

I had to look these up as – not generally collecting anything post-Blyton’s lifetime – I don’t have any of these already.

There are 12 in total, published between 1983 and 1984 (so practically brand-new, as we all agree that the 80s were only about 20 years ago, yes?) by World International.

Each contains between 6 and 11 stories, first published in Sunny Stories, then reprinted in either Tales of Green Hedges, The Second Bedside Book, The Fourth Bedside Book, Now For a Story or The Good Morning Book.

Much of this content plus other stories were then used in 15 Tell-a-Story Books, though only numbers 5-15 were titled Fifth Tell-A-Story Book and so on. The first four were The Good Morning Book, Tales of Green Hedges, The Queer Adventure and Now For a Story. Sounding familiar?

Anyway, as I have very few copies of Sunny Stories, and none of the books mentioned above all the stories in these three are new to me.

Artwork

The illustrator for these was uncredited – but both the covers and internal illustrations are credible. The colouring of the covers is a bit childish (she says of books for children) compared to the linework, I think, but over-all they really aren’t bad.

It’s a pleasant surprised to see that there are internal illustrations given the cheaper, shorter, format of these books, and that they are good is even more surprising. They’re not on a par with Soper or Tresilian for example but they are good, for both the wildlife and the fairy/fantasy characters depicted.

In addition to that the endpapers are also illustrated – using small versions of the illustrations from within the books. Although black-and-white and lacking the tree, it reminds me of the endpapers from the 1960s Ladybird books. Perhaps that was a deliberate move!

The Stories

I haven’t actually had the time to read the stories in these books but you can see a list of what’s in them here –

Sneezing Powder and Other Stories
Andrew’s Robin and Other Stories
The Snow-White Pigeon and Other Stories

From the titles I can guess that most of them are fantasy tales with fairies, brownies, gnomes and wizards, though there are some animal tales in there too.

All-in-all these little books are an attractive way to collect some of Blyton’s stories from the 1930s.