Issue 4 - On the Trail of Verrill

On the Trail of Verrill

Issue 4 – Dated April 2010

This edition of the newsletter includes both Verrill’s fiction and non-fiction. The Sea Stories are a co-operative venture, which was a great boon to the collection of ‘pulp’ stories from the 1920s.

It happened that one magazine vendor on ABEBOOKS.COM, had a series of ‘Travel’ stories and added to our knowledge of what Verrill wrote.

Verrill’s magazine articles now number 118, while his books are at 107.

This newsletter may contain news from or about Gail Kelly, Doug Frizzle and A. Hyatt Verrill (1871-1954). It’s intended as an update, and to show progress in making the prolific work of Verrill available to all.

· E-published by Stillwoods, The First Shall Be Last. A short sea story that includes, in the beginning, a little tale on shipwreck that is taken from Verrill’s youth, and is included in his autobiography.

· E-published by Stillwoods, Fightin’ Bills Greatest Battle. This short story comes from the Sea Stories magazine series; June 1924 for this one. It is unusual to find grammatical mistakes in these stories but this particular story had a series of mistakes in it. One still appears in the title’s picture, double click on the photo in the story to enlarge it.

I have to send apologies to Philip Bolton who did all the photography of these sea stories. They have been very slow appearing since it takes me a long time to digitally capture or render the stories.

· E-published by Stillwoods, The Radio Detective Southward Bound. This is a full length novel, juvenile fiction done in a series of four volumes; this is story 3. I posted this on archive.org as well as my own website. It is a great series, like the Hardy Boys; I have not updated any of the original language, spelling or expressions. (A printed volume of stories 3 and 4 is currently in draft form.) The Library of Congress is digitizing the first two volumes.

· E-Published by Cornell University, not a great version, since it is painful to use, Foods America Gave the World, 1937. The title says all, it is a book about chocolate, corn, potatoes, peanuts and other foods that arrived on the world’s plates via the Americas. (originally well illustrated, some in colour.)

· E-Published by Stillwoods, at long last, a PDF (portable document format) version of The Book of the Motor Boat from 1916. This rare book was actually digitized (poorly) by Google a long time ago but never really released. Then Barnes&Nobel, American publishers, released an eBook version, selling for one cent, on their proprietary eBook software; also the book was not available to Canadians. Thanks to some good thinking on the American side of the border, it is now available to all though the reproduction quality remains poor.

· E-Published by Stillwoods, Rubbing Elbows with the Friendly Chileans from Travel magazine August 1925. Included are a couple of advertisements for cruises that really caught my imagination. This article also shows us a little about the personal side of AHV. Travel magazine articles are nonfiction, and about people and places.

· E-Published by Stillwoods, webpage on Strange Ways of the Chileans from Travel magazine May 1925.

· E-Published by Stillwoods, Under the Shadow of Arequipa's Holy Mountain, this story completes all of the “Travel” stories from 1925. There were seven in total, so far as known about travelling in Chile, Bolivia, and Peru.

· E-Published by Stillwoods, while in the process of reading and digitizing on of the Travel magazines, I came across a story about the Philippines that I just had to read. It’s getting just about as easy to read the stories as to digitize them. So… What About the Philippines?, again from 1925.

The window to the reprint works of Verrill in our blog, appears to link direct to a ‘buy the book’ window. Here is a more friendly link to our storefront. Stillwoods Storefront. There are ten published books. Radio Detectives 3&4 is still in draft form. The Outboard Boys series is by the author, Roger Garis., whose books were again not available to the public so I did a spot of work. These reprints are indeed rare; in one case I know of only four copies of the work worldwide, so my labour has been rewarding.

Feel free to hunt around in our links. (PLEASE remember that most of the images in the blog and newsletter are hyperlinked, that is clickable, to higher resolution imaging.)