Blue Electrode

The latest of our proofreading projects to be completed is The Brighton Boys in the Trenches.

The Brighton Boys series is something that may be a bit hard for the modern reader to imagine: books for young boys glorifying the act of going to war, written during an ongoing conflict. Using the same basic hardcover series format as Tom Swift or the Bobbsey Twins, these books provide juvenile adventures in various World War I contexts. Unlike many similar series, though, the Brighton Boys books do not follow the same heroes from title to title; instead, each adventure features different students from the fictional Brighton Academy. Given the subject matter, there is a rather grim reason for this atypical format!

While the overall series concept is itself a bit shocking, The Brighton Boys in the Trenches goes a step further by dealing with what is probably the dirtiest and most horrific aspect of a dirty and horrific subject: trench warfare. The plot is simple enough: after encountering a boastful German, Herbert Whitcomb, a 17-year-old orphan with an eye for shooting, leaves school to enlist along with his Irish sidekick Roy Flynn. Before long, they are engaged in combat in France, facing gas attacks, trench foot and other dangers!

As a work of fiction, the book leaves much to be desired. Its main characters are two-dimensional at best, and the prose is littered with long, awkward, nearly-unreadable sentences. The author’s most ambitious attempt at achieving literary merit appears to be having one of his characters name a gun after a Dickens character. The plot is thin, just a series of action-filled incidents loosely strung together. However, despite its flaws, the book is quite interesting as a piece of social history.

The early portions of the book, set in America, have a decidedly paranoid tone. Germans and their agents are actively trying to turn the public against the war, and the book makes it very clear that acts of physical violence are perfectly acceptable to counter such dangerous speech. Once the action switches overseas, the book’s role as propaganda remains fairly clear. The Germans are generally referred to in dehumanizing terms, and while the conflict is unquestionably portrayed as dangerous, the text is designed to frequently imply American superiority and inevitable victory.

The book’s role as propaganda is not particularly surprising; more startling are its occasional deviations from predictability. There is a heroic depiction of an implicitly homosexual — or at least feminized — character (“He possessed a manner that some would have termed ‘sissy’”). There are occasional philosophical tangents about the madness of war (“In times of peace we regard the murder of one person as something over which to get up a vast deal of excitement and much indignation, but in warfare we plan for the killing of thousands as a business matter and read of it often with actual elation.”) and the pitfalls of stereotyping the enemy (“It is all wrong, unfair and a little small to consider all the people in any land unworthy; don’t you think so?”). And while the book at one point suggests that it is best “to draw the mantle of delicacy over those details of horror that follow a close conflict” it still offers some surprisingly disturbing details, as in this passage:

“They’re both gone! Wiped out! Shell! It hit right at Bill Neely’s feet! I couldn’t see anything but legs and arms and things.”

“Killed?”

“Done for.”

“Poor chaps! The only two boys in the family, too. Their poor old mother’ll miss them.”

“Know them, Pyle?”

“Sure; since we were kids. Just across the street.”

That about sums up the book: a strange mix of series fiction shallowness and gritty realism, an uncomfortable compromise between propaganda and protest, and a rather unengaging read that is nonetheless fascinating throughout.

If you are interested in experiencing the whole thing for yourself, you can read it online or download it in many popular eBook formats at Project Gutenberg.

This week’s proofreading project is another of Frank Tousey’s how-to manuals, from the same series that brought you How to Fence and How to Become an Engineer.

This time around, the subject matter could be viewed as being a bit more ghoulish: taxidermy. How to Stuff Birds and Animals provides instructions on how to preserve a large variety of creatures (including a wide range of mammals, from hedgehogs to dolphins, as well as birds, insects, fish and reptiles). The text is accompanied by some occasionally disturbing illustrations.

If you want to help preserve this vintage book in electronic format, you can join in at the project page. To learn more about the proofreading process, see this earlier post.

The first two romances by Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller that we released, The Bride of the Tomb; and Queenie’s Terrible Secret, have proven very popular.  Fortunately, Mrs. Miller was an extremely prolific author, and we have a lot more in the pipeline.  The first of many new proofreading projects is another double volume, Guy Kenmore’s Wife; and The Rose and the Lily.

These stories are now available at the Distributed Proofreaders project.  If you are interested in helping us create new eBook editions of these nearly-forgotten (yet surprisingly memorable) novels, you can read more about our proofreading effort and then visit the project page.

As usual, we will post again when the final product is available for download; stay tuned!

This week we have a new title available for online proofreading.  The current offering is a 19th-century guide to trains called How to Become an Engineer, part of the same series of instructional manuals that brought you one of our earlier releases, How to Fence.

In just about sixty pages, the book covers railroad history, technical details about engines, career advice for aspiring engineers, and detailed instructions on how to build a working model train set.  The ambitiously-scoped text is accompanied by a wealth of illustrations and tables.

If you want to help with the proofreading efforts, you can join in at the project page.  To learn more about our proofreading efforts, see this earlier post.

Yet another of our proofreading projects has been completed.

This week’s offering is The Shadow of a Sin by Charlotte M. Brame (alias Bertha M. Clay), a dime novel romance examining (in high melodramatic form) the long-term consequences of a single impulsive action.

This book is considerably more sedate than our previous romantic offering, Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller’s The Bride of the Tomb; and, Queenie’s Terrible Secret.  While Mrs. Miller’s stories are filled with dramatic incident and sudden violence, Brame’s are considerably calmer, concerning themselves more with British society and emotional misunderstandings than with kidnappings and fiendish conspiracies.  That is not to say that there is no drama here or that Brame’s heroine suffers less than Millers’; however, The Shadow of a Sin is less likely than The Bride of the Tomb to shatter preconceptions about 19th century popular fiction.

The book can be read online or downloaded in a variety of popular e-reader formats at Project Gutenberg, which also has a variety of other works by Brame.

To learn more about the book and its author, see our previous post about this project.

Regular Blue Electrode readers will remember that we discovered a hidden cache of “dime novels” (and other turn-of-the-century popular literature) last summer and that we are adding some of our digitized titles to Project Gutenberg’s distributed proofreading project. We are pleased to announce the combination of these efforts with the completion of our first dime novel to go through the Project Gutenberg process: The Bride of the Tomb; and, Queenie’s Terrible Secret, a two-in-one volume, by Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller, now available to read online or in a variety of electronic formats for various ereading devices.

Demian and I both read this and we had a lot of fun! Both of the novels in this two-in-one edition were full of clichés and extremely predictable plot “twists,” but they each also had a few surprises, which was nice — not quite the formulaic romance novels we were expecting! Both of the stories have fairly similar basic plots (people who seem to be dead but are not really dead and instead have been abducted), which is probably why they were packaged together, but they each have their own slightly different twists and turns. Of particular interest, the women characters in these stories are much more active than the men, even the supposed “heroes” (but of course the women still do their fair share of swooning). Queenie also makes use of some unexpected narrative devices, such as nonlinear storytelling (it may not be done particularly well, but it’s still noteworthy in a late-19th-century text).

If you’re into marginalia, you should make sure to look at the page images of this book in our Digital Library as well. This book was part of our original dime novel discovery, so we believe the writing may be that of Dr. Charles Magee, language professor and literary adviser to The Villanovan in the 1920s (we’ll have more about Dr. Magee later). There are many brief (mostly one-word) notes on the plot and literary devices.

Although they may not be paragons of literature, these stories are quite fun and they do offer several surprises. And if you’d like to join our Mrs. Miller fan club, just let us know!

Another proofreading project is has been completed, and A Little Fleet by Jack Butler Yeats is now available for online reading or download in various popular eBook formats.

The attractively-illustrated children’s book describes the construction of several model boats and chronicles their adventures sailing down a river.  It’s a pleasant blend of craft manual, childhood nostalgia, and imagination, and it should still appeal to children (and the young-at-heart) today — though some readers will be alarmed by the tendency of the author to play with fire!

The finished eBook can be found at Project Gutenberg here, and more can be learned about its author in our online exhibit, Jack B. Yeats: Drawings & Illustrations.

Following the recent completion of our Atchoo! project, we have unveiled another example of George Niblo’s vaudeville comedy for proofreading.  This time, the title is What’s Your Hurry? A Deck Full of Jokers.  As with past examples from the Street & Smith Humor Library, this book gives a glimpse of comedic tastes from over a century ago, and sometimes they aren’t pretty — be prepared for some offensive stereotypes in between the puns.

If you aren’t put off by the subject matter or the hard to read decorative font, you can help with the proofreading efforts at the project page.  To learn more about our proofreading efforts, see this earlier post.

One of our earliest proofreading projects has just been completed.  Catholic Colonization in Minnesota is now available for download or online reading through Project Gutenberg.  The book, released in 1879, is designed as a guide for Catholics interested in setting up farms in Minnesota.  While this is a rather narrow topic, the book contains a variety of interesting details.  It offers elaborate (though possibly biased) descriptions of the economic and agricultural conditions of the period.  Railroad historians may also appreciate the tables describing travel arrangements.  Machinery aficionados will likely enjoy the illustrations of farm equipment found in the advertising section.  If any of this sounds worth a look, you can find the book here.

Balancing the Books

Another of our proofreading projects has been completed: George Niblo’s Atchoo! Sneezes from a Hilarious Vaudevillian, which started the process in August.

As mentioned previously, this book is a transcript of a live comedy routine from 1903.  For the most part, the humor has not aged well, particularly since there are quite a few nasty ethnic stereotypes on display.  However, some of the book’s targets are still considered fair game in some circles today — lawyers, policemen, newlyweds — and many of the jokes have a familiar ring to them.  Puns haven’t changed much in over a century.  Here is a representative example:

My brother Tom was hit on the head some time ago, and at the hospital they said they would have to amputate half his brain. I didn’t want them to, because he is absent-minded anyway.

“We’ll have to give him something to make him sleep,” said one of the surgeons.

“That won’t be necessary,” said another; “he’s a policeman.”

That made Tom sore, and he snapped: “I’ve got half a mind to cave in your ribs for you.”

“You won’t feel that way in a minute,” said the surgeon, “because that’s the half of your mind we’re going to cut out.”

It was a great operation. When I told my wife of the surgeon’s little joke and how Tom came back at him she said she never knew a time when Tom wasn’t ready to give anybody a piece of his mind.

If you are interested in the full experience of reading a Vaudeville routine (and are fully prepared to be offended), the complete book is now available for online reading or download to electronic reading devices from Project Gutenberg.