The Magic Bedknob; or, How to Become a Witch in Ten Easy Lessons
novel 1944 Bed-Knob and Broomstick
Record
| First published | 1944 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | novel |
| Canon status | |
| Internal chronology | 1 |
Synopsis
The Magic Bedknob is set in Bedfordshire, England, where three siblings, Carey, Charles, and Paul, are sent to stay with relatives for the summer and discover that their reclusive elderly neighbor, Miss Price, is secretly learning to be a witch, having caught her practicing on a broomstick. In exchange for their silence, Miss Price enchants an ordinary brass bedknob so that, once turned, it will carry the bed on which it is fitted anywhere the children wish to go. The children use the enchanted bedknob to travel to a series of increasingly fantastical places, testing both the limits of Miss Price's still-developing magic and their own growing friendship with her.
Where it sits
- Universe: Bed-Knob and Broomstick
- Series: Bed-Knob and Broomstick core; position 1 of 2 in the series' recorded order
- Author: Mary Norton
Notes
- From the series record (Bed-Knob and Broomstick): Two originally separate novellas -- The Magic Bedknob (1944, J.M. Dent UK / G.P. Putnam's Sons US) and its sequel Bonfires and Broomsticks (1947, J.M. Dent) -- later combined into a single omnibus volume, Bedknob and Broomstick, in 1957 with new illustrations by Erik Blegvad. Both original volumes are catalogued here under their own first-publication years per this project's author-credit-fidelity convention; the 1957 combined edition is the commonly available modern printing but not a separately registered work. Confirmed a genuinely separate, unrelated story from Mary Norton's The Borrowers, with no shared characters or setting -- a young boy and his siblings discover a magical bedknob that lets a bed travel through time and space, first to a Caribbean island and then, in the sequel, back to 17th-century England to meet a would-be necromancer. Loosely the basis for Disney's 1971 film Bedknobs and Broomsticks.
Neighbouring works
Publication order and internal chronology are tracked as two separate orderings, but they resolve to the exact same sequence for this book, so one combined line is shown instead of two identical ones.
- Reading order, within the series Bed-Knob and Broomstick: position 1 of 2: next Bonfires and Broomsticks (1947)
Sources
← Bed-Knob and Broomstick dossier · All universes
Part of the Library. Fields without an identified source are omitted, never guessed.