Buy Enid Blyton Books

Hopefully this page will give you a few pointers about whether to buy brand new Enid Blyton books or try to find secondhand copies. Buying secondhand from a local charity shop might be the cheapest way to restock your collection, but of course you'll have to hunt around a bit to find every title of every series!

Enid Blyton Boxed Sets, Collections, Complete SetsGo to Amazon.com for Enid Blyton Collections, Boxed Sets, and Complete Series
(choose between Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com)

Amazon is one answer. You can always find sellers offering complete boxed sets and collections. That's the thing about Enid Blyton books; you're probably looking for complete sets, not just indidivual titles. The official publisher, Hachette, has a terrible website that doesn't seem to offer complete sets, so I prefer to make it easier for readers by recommending Amazon (above) or a unique company called Navrang who sell British-printed titles as complete sets.

I've been recommending Navrang for ages now, and still do. They're the simplest solution for buying entire sets of popular Enid Blyton books with just a couple of clicks, and the free worldwide shipping for orders over $50 is simply unbeatable. Excellent customer service too. They sell individual titles as well as complete sets.

Here's the complete list of series and collections available from Navrang...

Most Popular:

Other Titles and Collections:

Navrang is located in Virginia, USA, but their books are shipped from a British printer in India via their Delhi warehouse. So you're getting British books at the cheapest prices anywhere. Navrang also offer free worldwide shipping for orders over $50 USD (or a small fee for orders under $50 USD), anywhere in the world.

Should I buy brand new books, or old secondhand copies?

In some ways nothing beats a brand new paperback with colorful modern covers and that fresh, newly-printed smell, and the knowledge that you're the first person to read that particular copy. If that's what you're after, then search on Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com, or Navrang, for the best prices around. But bear in mind that we're now in a "politically correct" era, and modern publishers have decided that some of Enid Blyton's phrases from the 1940s and 1950s are "inappropriate" in this day and age. Phrases like "George was as black as a nigger with soot," while not particularly unusual or upsetting fifty years ago, have been altered to something more acceptable, like "George was black with soot"—hardly a dramatic change, but a change nonetheless.

There are more noticeable changes for those who remember Enid Blyton books from their childhood. The black villain originally known as Jo-Jo in The Island of Adventure is, in modern editions, transformed into Joe—an ordinary white man. Meanwhile, the scene from The Mystery of the Hidden House, in which Mr Goon canes Ern across the palm of the hand, has been deleted entirely; now Ern merely gets a ticking off. And perfectly innocent exclamations of "how queer!" and "ooh, it's such a gay day!" have been updated to "how weird!" and "ooh, it's such a bright day!"...

Despite the changes, which understandably annoy most die-hard Enid Blyton book collectors, the new editions are perfectly readable for the new generation, and even for those adults who are revisiting their childhood. Most changes will go unnoticed unless you compare an old edition side by side with a new paperback.

If you really CANNOT stand to see Enid Blyton's work altered, then stick with pre-1980 secondhand paperbacks, which you can pick up from various online stores including eBay. If you want to get into collecting in a big way, go for pre-1968 hard back books, which are likely to contain all the original text. Also, these old copies will contain the original illustrations as well, which are often far superior and manage to capture the "feel" of the books in a way that modern illustrations don't.