ALONE HE DID IT!

New Zealand Listener, Volume 3, Issue 64, 13 September 1940, Page 9

ALONE HE DID IT!

Something More About "The Magnet" And Its Author

sadly reported that "The Magnet," most popular of schoolboy periodicals, had ceased publication, and that the boys of Greyfriars School — Billy Bunter, Harry Wharton and the Famous Five, and the rest-were no more. But now it seems possible that, as in the case of Mark Twain, the report of their deaths may have been, if not grossly exaggerated, at any rate somewhat too definite. According to "The Times" Educational Supplement of May 25, "The Magnet" has not ceased, but merely suspended, publication at the order of the British Paper Controller. The boys of Greyfriars School are therefore not finally dead but merely in a state of suspended animation for the duration, With victory they may revive. "The Times" gives some more interesting facts about this remarkable schoolboy journal. "The Magnet" was what the purveyors of magazines call, in their curious language. a "library." That is to say, every week it presented a complete and self-contained story of about 25,000 words, and this it had done for 32 years without a break. More than 50,000,000 words must thus have been written about Greyfriars. and its inmates-a record compared with which the Bertie Wooster cycle, the Barchester novels, the Forsyte Saga and the "Recherche du Temps Perdu" seem brief and sketchy efforts. It has been popularly supposed that a team of writers was needed to compile this I: The Listener of August 30 we

massive total, ringing the changes week in; wee) out. But in fact, Frank Richards, under whose name all the stories appeared, is a real person, one and indivisible, who has never faltered once in 32 years in turning out his weekly story, and has then ee it as a part-time job. "The Times" ends its note: "Now Harry Wharton and Co. are in suspense,

but when the Paper Controller is kind again and the mists clear from around Greyfriars, we can be sure that they will still be in the Remove, playing the same practical jokes on the same masters, foiling the schemes of the same rotters, and laughing as before. A new generation of boys will read every line about them, and be the better for it on the whole,"