Billy Bunter's Christmas Party

Billy Bunter's Christmas Party is a school story by Charles Hamilton writing as Frank Richards, using the characters and settings of the Greyfriars School stories published from 1908 to 1940 in The Magnet. The book's retail price was 7s 6d. First published in October 1949 by Charles Skilton Ltd, London, the fifth in a series of post-WWII hardback novels, it was subsequently reprinted by them in 1952 and 1957. It was reprinted in hardback in 1993 by Hawk Books. A Greyfriars School holiday story, the novel has a colour dust jacket, frontispiece and black and white illustrations by R. J. Macdonald. 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.