Posted by Ross on May 12, 2003 at 17:42:38 from 216.193.171.151 user Ross.
In Reply to: A Difficult Question! posted by Mike Dennis on May 10, 2003 at 16:25:16:
The American series most similar to Ransome in terms of plot and setting would have to be the Boxcar Children. However, this series is intended for a much younger audience than the SA series.
There seems to be a general consensus that there are few Ransome readers out there (America) that are not associated with TARS. From personal experience, the only place that I have ever seen the entire series on the shelf was at a small bookstore on Cape Code, where I purchased my first copy of SA. That said, the three large bookstores that we frequent often have copies of SA and one or two others on their shelves. That they are not always there, and that what stories are there varies, makes me believe that someone must be buying, and hopefully reading, these books. Even our relatively small library has copies of SA, PD, and WH, as well as two of his fairy tale books.
What I will say, and this is probobly intuitively obvious, is that in my travels, I tend to see more copies of these books in stores in the northeast, especially New England, as opposed to the midwest or Florida area.
As a related question, and at the risk of asking something that has been answered many times previously, what is the attraction of Ransome to Japaneese reader? How is it that the books became popular enough to be translated?