The Magnet

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The Magnet (1908 - 1940) was a United Kingdom weekly boys story paper published by Amalgamated Press. It contained a long school story each week (sometimes in serial format running over several issues) about the boys at Greyfriars School. It was created by the editor Percy Griffiths, building on the success of The Gem (1907 - 1939), with the author Charles Hamilton, who wrote stories of St. Jim's (another fictional school) for The Gem under the pen name of Martin Clifford. For the stories of Greyfriars School and its inhabitants, Hamilton chose the pseudonym Frank Richards. Its most famous character was Billy Bunter, of the lower Fourth Form at Greyfriars. Most issues of The Magnet also included a shorter serial story (a variety of detective, scouting, and adventure yarns were featured), and many issues also included a newspaper produced by the characters themselves and called the Greyfriars Herald; but these parts of the paper were not written by Charles Hamilton.

The Magnet ceased printing in 1940, partly because sales had been declining for a number of years, but mainly due to the difficulties and high cost of obtaining paper during the Second World War. The final issue was the opening story in a new series; at least four other issues are known to have been already completed, but these were never published, and are now presumed lost.

The boys of Greyfriars School went on to appear in 38 novel length books (published between 1947 and 1965), some of which revisited plots first used in The Magnet, and in a television series that ran from 1951 - 1961 on the BBC.

Many of the Magnets were reprinted in hardback form under the Howard Baker and Greyfriars Book Club imprints from 1969 to 1990, and a number of the post war books were reprinted in paperback format in the 1960s.

For a comprehensive list of all the Magnet issues (numbers 1 to 1683) see List of Issues of The Magnet. A guide to every issue was published as The Magnet Companion in 1971 (reprinted in 1977 and again in a concise format in 1986 by the Howard Baker Press, all now out of print).

A variety of articles on Charles Hamilton and his various pseudonyms, and the school stories he created, have been published in the newsletters of the Old Boys Book Club, The Friars Club ([1]) and the Museum Press. The British Juvenile Story Papers Index ([2]) contains detailed listings for the Magnet and a wide range of comics and story papers published over the same period.

[edit] External links

• BillyBunter mailing list for discussion of The Gem and The Magnet