Into the Wardrobe

I never knew that they were first published under different names!
You're right. I like the other titles much better.

The "Shoes" titles are the American versions, I think.

If you like Ballet Shoes and Curtain Up (Theatre Shoes is abridged) and you haven't read The Painted Garden, then you should definitely get hold of a copy if you can . It has a lot of links with Ballet Shoes ... one of the girls in it is a student at Madame Fidolia's school, and she meets the adult Posy and Pauline Fossil in California. The book is about the making of a film of The Secret Garden, which is quite interesting. I think she based it on the filming of the 1949 film version.

I re-read Painted Garden about 12 years ago, and loved it again. I'd like to get a copy. I'm gradually collecting the Streatfeilds I like.
Sadly it's hard to get them unabridged; I've got a secondhand copy "Curtain Up" the second of the Madame Fidolia school ones, but when I read it I found some of my favourite bits missed out. Darnit!
It happened at a time when some silly publisher thought children couldn't read books longer than about 200 pages any more - suddenly in the late 90s Rowling and her publicity machine proved them wrong!
I've got Tennis Shoes, and would love to get White Boots.

I've been tending to buy old first editions of the Streatfeilds over the internet, as they're not too expensive and then I can be sure that they're not abridged. I have a hardback and a paperback of Curtain Up, and the paperback is abridged. I believe the paperback of The Painted Garden was abridged to take out the war references.

Though I have a later hardback of Ballet Shoes which is abridged, and an earlier paperback that isn't!

The Circus is Coming is really good, it paints a much more realistic picture of a touring circus than say, the Enid Blyton circus books (which are still entertaining though).

How can you tell if they are abridged? Why would they abridge those books anyway?! They can't be that long in the original! Now I'm scared that my "Shoe" books are probably abridged, mutilated, deformed, distorted, warped, falsified, and generally disfigured.

I have the BullsEye Book editions of Dancing, Theater, and Ballet Shoes published by Random House in 1994. Does that make them abridged?

I spit upon all editors and abridgers. Editing is a nasty filthy habit.

Take a look at The Little Grey Men, written and beautifully illustrated by Denys Watkins-Pitchford (who sometimes wrote as "BB"). The book is about gnomes - - Cloudberry, Sneezewort, Baldmoney - - who live in a lovingly-rendered English countryside.

Let me also recommend that folks get to know the art of the 19th-century artist Samuel Palmer, especially in his early "Shoreham" period and in his late etchings after Virgil and Milton. I recommend Geoffrey Grigson's Samuel Palmer: The Visionary Years for text, although more recent books have better reproductions of the art.