Enid Blyton - Mason Willey's Collectors' and Enthusiasts' Guide to First Editions
Famous Five series

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The Famous Five series is by far the most successful series of full-length stories that Enid Blyton ever produced. There are twenty-one titles covering every year from 1942 to 1963 (except 1959). Enid took four and a half days to write each book, and all ran to many reprints and were published in many different countries and languages. History does not record who it was who first named Julian, Dick, George, Anne and Timmy the dog "The Famous Five", but whoever it was, it was not original. The first to be called thus were the chums of The Remove in the Billy Bunter stories of Frank Richards. The original editions were illustrated by Eileen Soper.
 
 
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Eileen A. Soper - a self-portrait
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A picture for R. L. Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses which could almost be a young Julian

Eileen A. Soper, 1905-90 
 
 

Eileen Soper illustrated a great number of Enid Blyton's short stories, but it is for her illustrations to the Famous Five series of books that she is best known. Her pictures are inextricably linked to the books for those of us who grew up with the originals, and none of the artists who illustrated later editions caught the atmosphere of the stories quite as effectively. Enid Blyton had the greatest respect for her work, but Eileen, for her part, was often irritated by what she saw as Enid's pickiness in wanting finer details of her pictures changed. It was from her father, George Soper, known best for his pictures of horses, that she inherited her artistic talent, and her etchings were exhibited at The Royal Academy, London in 1921 when she was just sixteen years old. She made a long study of badgers in the wild and published her great work When Badgers Wake in 1955.

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A Soper badger

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All the books were published by Hodder & Stoughton and illustrated by Eileen A. Soper.
 
Five On a Treasure Island                              1942
Five Go Adventuring Again                              1943
Five Run Away Together                                 1944
Five Go to Smuggler's Top                              1945
Five Go Off in a Caravan                               1946
Five On Kirrin Island Again                            1947
Five Go Off To Camp                                    1948
Five Get Into Trouble                                  1949
Five Fall Into Adventure                               1950
Five On a Hike Together                                1951
Five Have a Wonderful Time                             1952
Five Go Down to the Sea                                1953
Five Go to Mystery Moor                                1954
Five Have Plenty of Fun                                1955
Five On a Secret Trail                                 1956
Five Go to Billycock Hill                              1957
Give Get Into a Fix                                    1958
Five On Finniston Farm                                 1960
Five Go to Demon's Rocks                               1961 
Five Have a Mystery to Solve                           1962
Five Are Together Again                                1963

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The third book in the series from 1944

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The seventeenth book in the series from 1958

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Eileen Soper may have been a wonderful artist, but apparently she was no good with machinery. Here, in a detail from the dustwrapper of Five on Kirrin Island Again, George peers through the wrong end of a telescope! (the matter was corrected in later editions).