One of the nice things about owning your own publishing company is that you can publish what you like. My wife Karen likes old-fashioned boys’ adventure fiction, which she rediscovered when our son Dan was in cub scouts. Some of these books are very well-crafted and are buoyed up by the optimism of a can-do age where anything seemed possible. (An attitude I far prefer to today’s mood of learned helplessness.)
Karen has collected an impressive library of first-rate adventure fiction, most of which has been out of print and forgotten since around WWII. Well, we know what to do when that happens!
First out of the chute is Percy Keese Fitzhugh’s Tom Slade, Boy Scout. Tom Slade is a young teen hoodlum who discovers that the local boy scout troop is having way more fun than he is. Almost by accident, he pulls himself out of the downward spiral that is claiming his drunken father. Any synopsis of the book reads like a melodrama, but the book is put together with more sensitivity and realism than one would expect from the genre. I liked it far more than I expected to. It turns out that the characters were based on real boys. This is a great book.
First published in 1915, the book has a fascinating retro quality without being hard to understand.
Anyway, check out the book’s Web page and read the sample chapters.
This is just the first volume of the nineteen-book Tom Slade series. We intend to print them all, plus the books about Tom Slade’s friends: Roy Blakeley, Westy Martin, Pee-wee Harris, and the rest.
Go Karen!