Collection Book of the Week – The River of Adventure

Having changed the schedule for my weekly book collection post it looks like I may have been successful in actually getting this week’s post out on time. It had to happen eventually, I suppose. Hopefully I will be able to write and schedule next week’s post too, as I will be away for a while over the next couple of weeks and I am not sure how much time I will find to post.

So, I know you are all champing at the bit to once again sample the delights of my book collection, and to that end I shall move onto this week’s collection book of the week with no further delay. The award for this week’s book, although I am not sure it is actually an award, goes to, yet another Enid Blyton title, ‘The River of Adventure’. It should come as no surprise that it is another Enid Blyton book, since as I have mentioned previously, the majority of my collection consists of her titles.

This is the eighth and final book in Enid Blyton’s Adventure series. The series was originally going to end at the sixth book, ‘The Ship of Adventure’, but due to pressure from readers she relented and added two more titles. This was lucky for me since one of my favourite books of the series was ‘The Circus of Adventure’, the seventh book. My other favourite was the third book, ‘The Valley of Adventure’.

The copy that I have here is, as far as I can tell, a first edition and was published by Macmillan and Company Limited in1955. The cover price was a snip at 8s 6d, a bargain in my opinion. The dust cover is in reasonable condition, although it is slightly fragmented at the top and bottom of the spine.

This book has a great dust cover illustration making for a very attractive book. The cover illustration, and indeed all of the internal illustrations for this book, and the other seven in the series, were by Stuart Tresilian. I really like his style and it definitely adds to the pleasure that I get from this series.

The joy experienced by books is not restricted purely to the words, but the whole experience. A good book can excite all of the senses, the sight, smell, feel, even the sound of the pages turning. No doubt some smart arse will notice that I haven’t mentioned taste yet, but even that can be excited by a good book. No I am not talking about licking the pages or anything, that would just be weird, but I do find myself licking my lips and clicking my tongue over a good, decent copy of a great book. Yes that may be weird in itself, but I never said I wasn’t odd.

Having recently read first editions of the entire Adventure series, I am eager to start reading the latest editions of them from 2011/2012, as I know there were a number of changes made to bring them up to date and to make them more politically correct and relevant to today’s readers. This is not generally something I approve of and so it will be interesting to see what changes have been made.

Hopefully you will not start getting too bored with the Enid Blyton books, as I have quite a few left to feature. I will to my best to intersperse them with different author’s titles. That said, I expect that next week’s book will also be by Enid Blyton, however I am trying to ensure that I feature different a series each week as well.

As usual, any comments are welcome, be they related to the post or otherwise, and they are especially welcome if they are lewd. Note the new tagline and shock me, reserved Englishman that I am!