Forgotten Vintage Children's Lit We Want Republished! discussion

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauline...
(Rather than rewrite everything, I'll just give the Wikipedia link!)

Here's an author who is not well-represented on OpenLibrary (again, a case of having two separate profiles there, argh), and is still missing some books on her GR page.

I don't know her works, admittedly, but I am interested in reading a good many of them!

Here's the Wikipedia Bibliography:

As Helen Clare

Dolls series, illustrated by Cecil Leslie
Five Dolls in a House - 1953
Five Dolls and the Monkey - 1956
Five Dolls in the Snow - 1957
Five Dolls and Their Friends - 1959
Five Dolls and the Duke - 1963

Merlin's Magic (1953)
Bel the Giant (1956), illus. Peggy Fortnum; reissued as The Cat and the Fiddle and Other Stories (1968), illus. Ida Pellei
Seven White Pebbles (1960), illus. Cynthia Abbott

As Pauline Clarke

The Pekinese Princess (1948)
The Great Can(1952)
The White Elephant (1952)
Smith's Hoard (1955) also published as Hidden Gold (1957) and as The Golden Collar (1967) (would really like to read this one!): a British school-holiday mystery story. A brother and sister are sent for the school holidays to their great-aunt who lives in the country. During their train trip they coincidentally meet a boastful young man who tells them he is a dealer in second-hand jewellery, and shows them a strange gold item. The children work to untangle a mystery which includes secret and illegal archaeological digging, theft of historical artefacts, and even the haunting by the ghost of the Celtic smith who buried the hoard and died in tribal warfare. The story is narrated by the younger sister (with some help from her brother and his friend), and, by the end, the mystery is solved.
Sandy the Sailor (1956)
The Boy with the Erpingham Hood (1956)
James and the Policeman (1957)
James and the Robbers (1959)
Torolv the Fatherless (1959)
The Lord of the Castle (1960)
The Robin Hooders (1960)
Keep the Pot Boiling (1961) "about a contemporary vicar's family. Their efforts to amuse themselves constructively resemble the family novels of her contemporaries Rumer Godden and Noel Streatfeild. The vicar suffers from what we would now call bipolar disorder."
James and the Smugglers (1961)
Silver Bells and Cockle Shells (1962)
The Twelve And The Genii (1962), illus. Cecil Leslie; U.S. title, The Return of the Twelves
James and the Black Van (1963)
Crowds of Creatures (1964)
The Bonfire Party(1966)
The Two Faces of Silenus (1972) (I'm quite interested in this one)

As Pauline Hunter Blair

Anglo-Saxon Northumbria, Variorum by Peter Hunter Blair (editor, with Michael Lapidge) (1984)
The Nelson Boy: An Imaginative Reconstruction of a Great Man's Childhood (1999)
A Thorough Seaman: The Ships' Logs of Horatio Nelson's Early Voyages Imaginatively Explored (2000)
Warscape (2002)
Jacob's Ladder (Church Farmhouse Books, Bottisham, 2003)

The Return of the Twelves is one of my favourite books. :)

Sem wrote: "The Return of the Twelves is one of my favourite books. :)"

...and I'll prioritize that, then! Thanks! :) (Free to read on OpenLibrary, too!)

Capn wrote: "Sem wrote: "The Return of the Twelves is one of my favourite books."

It's her 'classic'. I do intend to read the rest, including the one you recced, but...time constraints...Kindle crammed with books....piles of books everywhere...

I remember reading it and thinking 'Children's authors used to write beautifully. What happened?'

I had the same thought reading the Dorrie books (i.e. Dorrie's Magic) the other day, by Patricia Coombs. In this case, it was more for the laborious and lovely pencil drawings. They don't make them like they used to!
And this prompted a conversation between Hilary and me, as to why publishers don't re-release luxury omnibus editions of these books! The work has been done, the quality is incredible - surely there's easy money there? (I'd pay a mint for a nice hardcopy omnibus of all the Dorrie stories, for example! And they definitely precede me by a generation, so it's not even for nostalgia's sake!)

Publishers.... Not a fan. If it weren't for independent small presses resurrecting older works - in limited editions or cheap ebooks - I wouldn't have much genre fiction to read.

My complaint is that too many small presses are reprinting vintage titles in paperback only - I'd buy if hardcover, but I refuse to pay top dollar for a new paperback. It's also frustrating to see the *reprints* go out of print and to see their prices escalate (Girls Gone By, I'm looking at you), but I imagine that's due to limited licensing run contracts.

The world of print-on-demand has opened up so many possibilities - I wish the rights-holders would take advantage of them. Nothing need be "out of print". Offer paperback, hardcover, or ebook so everyone can be happy! Limited print runs and warehousing costs? How twentieth century!

And just to keep a little on-topic, Return of the Twelves (as I own it) is a wonderful book - and there are some tangentially related books by others, one of which is Glass Town.

Agree absolutely with you, Michael - it would be serious collectors / serious readers making up a large percentage of that group buying resurrected titles... why not offer a Folio Society or Everyman's Library-quality hardcover?

On the otherhand, I'd run out of money pretty quickly if they were all so. ;) But the e-book argument - now this is one I really don't understand! Low to no production costs, once you've already typeset it... truly a mystery to me!

I didn't know Glass Town, but as it was on the "Best of Bronte" list ( https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/1... ), I added The Return of the Twelves, too. :) Thanks for that!

Michael wrote: "My complaint is that too many small presses are reprinting vintage titles in paperback only - I'd buy if hardcover, but I refuse to pay top dollar for a new paperback. It's also frustrating to see ..."

Yes, I agree on all points. I don't know why out-of-print but important scholarly works aren't available as ebooks at reasonable cost or print-on-demand for those who prefer a hard copy. Fiction that's worth collecting should be hardcover, as you say, and ebook. They're stuck in outmoded ways of doing business.

Capn wrote: "Agree absolutely with you, Michael - it would be serious collectors / serious readers making up a large percentage of that group buying resurrected titles... why not offer a Folio Society or Everym..."
And then there's the issue of some academic publishers charging exorbitant sums for ebooks. This is part of what drives online piracy.

I did not know how prolific Pauline Clarke was. I loved her Carnegie Medal winning The Twelve And The Genii, but must warn that there are a lot of typos in the American edition, in The Return of the Twelves, which unfortunately also seems to be the edition most readily available.

The Dolls series is very funny, the dolls all have distinct personalities, particularly Vanessa, the oldest doll, who is very snobbish and bossy, and then there’s gentle Jane, mischievous Amanda, little Lupin, and the French doll, Jacqueline (referred to disdainfully by Vanessa as ‘the paying guest’). And there’s the Monkey, who lives on the roof and shouts rude things down the chimney. Elizabeth, the little girl who owns the dolls and their house, finds she can shrink to doll size and interact with them, the dolls decide she is their landlady, and bombard her with requests for improvements to be made to the house,