For as long as I've been able to read, I've been a big fan of the Hardy Boys. I easily read over 150 of their books while I was a kid between the original series and the totally '90s Casefiles series. Flash forward to college, when I learned that something called the Stratemeyer Syndicate was responsible for loads of the series books that I remember from that time in my life—the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Tom Swift, the Bobbsey Twins... The list goes on and on.
The Syndicate's army of ghostwriters cranked out hundreds of books over the years in a myriad of different series, but I've recently become more interested with the man where it all began, Edward Stratemeyer. Stratemeyer was a fairly prolific writer himself before he created his story-building factory, but most of his work remains fairly unknown. Largely in the mold of Horatio Alger (famous for his 1868 story Ragged Dick and the books that followed), Stratemeyer's stories tend to feature young men coming-of-age and/or going on adventures of one type or another, but what I like best about reading them is getting a window to the past. The vocabulary, the setting, the customs, the morals—like any works of fiction, they're written through a particular lens, but I find it's often a fascinating one.
Stratemeyer's earliest professional stories were serialized in a Philadelphia publication called Golden Days for Boys and Girls. As a rule, its publisher, James Elverson, didn't ever resell its stories, so they were never published anywhere else. The relative obscurity of these stories means that you can't even find them in places like Project Gutenberg, even though they've long since fallen into the public domain. I've got some time on my hands (IYKYK), so I'm going to work on transcribing and submitting the ones that I can find to PG.
As I work on them, I'm going to be posting my transcriptions here, and perhaps exploring a bit of the cultural context around these stories as we go. Let's start at the very beginning, as it's a very good place to start, so my next post will be chapter 1 of Victor Horton's Idea, a relatively short 14-chapter story. Stratemeyer's first professional story, the first three chapters were published in Vol. X, No. 49 of Golden Days, which has a publication date of Nov 2, 1889. For an inkling of what was going on in the world at the time, check out Wikipedia's overview because I don't know about you, but I don't know very much about the first Cleveland administration.
