Tom Swift in the City of Gold

I thought that it would be pretty difficult not to like a book containing a chapter called “Beware The Head-Hunters!” But then, I didn’t expect a Tom Swift book to make blatantly untrue statements about anything but science.

The Golden Boys in the Maine Woods

I’d never heard of the Golden Boys before, but — well, I just had to get The Golden Boys in the Maine Woods. I think I’d better just transcribe the first paragraph:

The sun was hardly half way over the horizon when the door of a small log cabin some fifty feet from the shore of Moosehead Lake opened, and a boy about nineteen years old stepped out. He was dressed only in a pair of swimming trunks and his perfectly formed body, brown as a nut, made a pretty picture against the background of the cabin as he paused to draw into his lungs huge drafts of the spruce scented air. In a moment he was joined by another boy a little younger and not quite as tall, but no less beautifully developed.

The author is L.P. Wyman, Ph.D., Dean of the Pennsylvania Military College.

New Old Books

This weekend I was upstate with my family, and on Saturday we visited a used book store that my parents like a lot but where I’ve never found anything particularly interesting. I was about to not find anything interesting again this time, but while I was looking around the little room where they keep the children’s books, one of the store owners — I think — came into the room to get something out of the closet. I looked over his shoulder and saw piles and piles of exactly the kinds of books I wanted, mostly boys’ series like Tom Swift, The Boy Scouts, and Percy Keese Fitzhugh’s boy scout books. The guy let me look through them, and with the help of my father and my brother, who are much taller than I am, I got to look through most of them.

I ended up getting six books: two Tom Swifts (the first Tom Swift — think Tom Swift’s Motorcycle rather than Tom Swift’s Jetmarine), two Fitzhughs (one Tom Slade and one Pee-Wee Harris), one trashy looking women’s novel with nice illustrations and a main character named Sybil, and The Golden Boys in the Maine Woods.

I’ve just finished reading the latter. I am about to post about it, but I can’t figure out how to post two Flickr photos at once, so…

Phronsie Pepper; The Youngest of the Five Little Peppers

I’m completely confused by Margaret Sidney’s Five Little Peppers books. It’s not about the contents of the books — they’re fairly straightforward. But the number and order of the books has always been a bit jumbled, and now, after reading Phronsie Pepper; The Youngest of the “Five Little Peppers,” I’m baffled.

Nelson the Newsboy: Ads

Nelson the Newsboy has a pretty nice selection of ads in the back. I transcribed a bunch of them because…well, I don’t know why. But I did.

Nelson the Newsboy

This week I finally got a chance to open a box of books that one of my uncles sent me during the winter. It included five Horatio Alger books, four of which I already had. That’s pretty weird, because I only had about twelve Algers, and he wrote about a hundred.

The one that I didn’t already have is Nelson the Newsboy. I don’t know how much of it Alger wrote, though. It’s one of several books left unfinished at Alger’s death and completed by Edward Stratemeyer under the name Arthur M. Winfield, which he also used for the Rover Boys series.