''Billy Bunter of Greyfriars School'' is a

school story The school story is a fiction genre centring on older pre-adolescent and adolescent school life, at its most popular in the first half of the twentieth century. While examples do exist in other countries, it is most commonly set in English boardi ...

by Charles Hamilton writing as Frank Richards, using the characters and settings of the

Greyfriars School Greyfriars School is a fictional English public school used as a setting in the long-running series of stories by the writer Charles Hamilton, who wrote under the pen-name of Frank Richards. Although the stories are focused on the Remove (or lo ...

stories published from 1908 to 1940 in ''

The Magnet ''The Magnet'' was a British weekly boys' story paper published by Amalgamated Press. It ran from 1908 to 1940, publishing a total of 1,683 issues. Each issue cost a halfpenny and contained a long school story about the boys of Greyfriars Sch ...

''. The retail price was 5 shillings. The novel was an immediate success, with sales of 25,000 copies within a few weeks. This was the maximum allowed during post-war paper shortages. The novel was reprinted by the original publisher in 1947, 1948 and 1950. Subsequently, it was republished by Armada in August 1968 and by Hawk in January 1991.

Origins

After the closure of ''The Magnet'' in May 1940 due to wartime paper shortages, author Charles Hamilton was contractually barred by the publisher, Amalgamated Press, from continuing to write Greyfriars stories. However in 1946 publisher Charles Skilton negotiated the rights to publish new stories in book form. Hamilton, delighted, suggested a payment rate of £90 per book; but Skilton, short of capital, asked Hamilton to accept royalties instead. This proved to be greatly in Hamilton's favour: he received £1,000 instead of £90 for the first book.Hamilton Wright P223

References

1947 British novels British children's novels British comedy novels Novels set in high schools and secondary schools 1947 children's books {{1940s-comedy-novel-stub