Billy Bunter of Greyfriars School.

In the original dust sheet. Yellow cloth binding with black titles on the spine and on the front board.

William George Bunter is a fictional schoolboy created by Charles Hamilton using the pen name Frank Richards. He features in stories set at Greyfriars School, originally published in the boys' weekly story paper The Magnet from 1908 to 1940. The character has appeared in novels, on television, in stage plays, and in comic strips. He is in the Lower Fourth form of Greyfriars School, known as the Remove, whose members are 14–15 years of age. Originally a minor character, his role was expanded over the years with his antics being heavily used in the stories to provide comic relief and to drive forward the plots. Bunter's defining characteristics are his greediness and overweight appearance. His character is, in many respects, that of a highly obnoxious anti-hero. As well as his gluttony, he is also obtuse, lazy, racist, nosy, deceitful, slothful, self-important and conceited. These defects, however, are not recognised by Bunter. In his own mind, he is an exemplary character: handsome, talented and aristocratic; and he dismisses most of those around him as "beasts". The negative sides of Bunter are offset by several genuine redeeming features; such as his tendency, from time to time, to display courage in aid of others; his ability to be generous, on the rare occasions when he has food or cash; and above all his very real love and concern for his mother. All these, combined with Bunter's cheery optimism, his comically transparent untruthfulness and inept attempts to conceal his antics from his schoolmasters and schoolfellows, combine to make a character that succeeds in being highly entertaining but which rarely attracts the reader's lasting sympathy. Charles Harold St. John Hamilton (8 August 1876 – 24 December 1961) was an English writer, specialising in writing long-running series of stories for weekly magazines about recurrent casts of characters, his most frequent and famous genre being boys' public-school stories, though he also dealt with other genres. He used a variety of pen-names, generally using a different name for each set of characters he wrote about, the most famous being Frank Richards for the Greyfriars School stories (featuring Billy Bunter). Other important pennames included Martin Clifford (for St Jim's), Owen Conquest (for Rookwood) and Ralph Redway (for The Rio Kid). He also wrote hundreds of stories under his real name such as the Ken King stories for The Modern Boy. He is estimated to have written about 100 million words in his lifetime (Lofts & Adley 1970:170) and has featured in the Guinness Book of Records as the world's most prolific author. Vast amounts of his output are available on the Friardale website.