The Enid Blyton Society

What I was wanting to find out and thought perhaps somebody here would know the answer, is would a book published by a non British publisher have any differences? So as an example, if The Wishing Chair was an Australian or American publisher instead of Newnes, would any money be in $ not £, or any terms be altered for that country ie drapes instead of curtains, molasses instead of treacle? Or is it still exactly the same book that Enid wrote? Just something I'm wondering as I've seen a fair few 'US/Australian editions' that are cheaper than the British publishings and I wanted to know if they'd make any difference or not.

I only have one American edition, and that is 'Five Go To Mystery Moor'. regarding money, when the planes drop the packets of banknotes, they are still dollars (as in the English edition) and Julian converts their worth into 'our money' as he says - pounds. So that book seems to be unchanged.

In the German versions of Famous Five and St Clare's, they changed currency to D-Mark/Pfennige. The counterfeit money of "Fünf Freunde im Nebel" (Five Go To Mystery Moor) are still (US-)Dollar$ though.

Brilliant, thanks for the replies. I now feel happier about buying a non UK edition if it works out cheaper than one from an English seller. Opening up more book buying possibilities is always a good thing .

I've got a 1952 Australian edition of Circus Days Again and as far as I've seen, it's no different from the Dean edition I read when I was younger. Mind you, we had pounds, shillings and pence as currency in Australia up until 1966 and Australian English in general is a lot closer to standard British English (accent notwithstanding ) than American English is, so I don't think there would have been many words or expressions they would have felt the need to change anyway.

I think all the Blyton books I read as a child were published in Britain, but Mum (who had also grown up on Blyton and had lived in England for a couple of years) was always able to fill me in on the occasional words like "mackintosh" or "lorry" that we don't use in Australia, so it never bothered me.

I always think it takes something away from a book when international publishers think they need to change words that speakers of a different version of English supposedly won't understand. When I was in high school, I remember we were studying The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton, and some students in our class had British editions that changed a lot of the American words — "movie house" became "cinema", "auto wreck" became "car accident" and so on. It really spoiled the book, I thought, since the story was told from the perspective of a young American teenager who's in a gang — so why not use the kinds of words he would use and let international audiences look them up if they need to??