ABSTRACT
Enid Blyton’s effect on the development and understanding of children’s books in this country is incalculable. How profoundly discouraging it must have been for other children’s writers at that time! They must have wondered how any writer could keep pace with her phenomenal output. And there is another, more important, consideration: her work in the 1940s and 50s began to define for the general public what children’s books were, and how they were to be perceived. The only consistent alternative view in Britain was that represented by the new Puffin paperback series under the inspired editorship of Eleanor Graham for its first 95 titles, and thereafter of Kaye Webb.
