An Enid Blyton

"box set" is on offer from the state newspaper. It is the latest in a series of "box sets" designed to offer reading matter to the young - and sell papers.
It starts tomorrow with "Five on a treasure island". I don't think I read too many of the "Famous Five" books. For some reason I didn't have access to them. I found a second hand one a couple of years back and read it. It didn't excite me.
I read my share of Enid Blyton as a child. There were Blyton books in the school library. My father borrowed those - among others - and read them to me when I was about two. I remember Noddy and Big Ears well. Later my brother had a pedal car similar to the car in the books. Yes, the Golliwog is now considered dreadful but he was just accepted when they were written. There were the Enid Blyton Story Books and the Annual and then, by the time I was at school aged four, I was reading things like "The Secret Seven" and "The Magic Faraway Tree" and more for myself. 
I was also reading a lot of other things. I was one of  those children who read compulsively, anything from what was on the cereal box to the advertisements on the way to wherever we were going.  Enid Blyton's writing was fun at the time but I don't think I took it too seriously. It was just there. 
By the time I was at teacher training college Enid Blyton's work was considered to be dreadful. It was banned in school and all other state funded libraries.  
As a school librarian I found parents asking me in a worried sort of way whether they should ban their children from reading it at home. What, they wanted to know, was wrong with it?
My standard response was,"If it is the only thing your child reads then it is a bit like a diet of nothing but ice cream. You need meat and vegetables as well."  Most of them understood that very well. I much preferred the idea of a child reading about "The Castle of Adventure" to reading nothing at all. They might go on to read about real castles. 
In the past few years I have noticed Enid Blyton's books are back in the bookshops, often as box sets of series. The "Faraway Tree" series was originally published in 1939 and that they should be reprinted over seventy-five years later and sold in this way is extraordinary.
Enid Blyton did not have a happy life. She divorced, had affairs, remarried, and gave her children to the care of nannies. Her daughters, Gillian and Imogen, found her immature, demanding and unstable. She eventually succumbed to Alzheimer's and died at just 71. It was only after that the two girls felt they were "free". 
Despite that she gave a great deal of pleasure to hundreds of thousands of children - and still does. Her books have sold millions of copies.
It will be interesting to see how children react to this "box set".