Working on the bookshelves in the loft above the living room and came up on some real treasures. I have always been drawn to old books--mainly the sort my grandmother might have read in the very early 1900s--and evidently I stowed a bunch of them up here.
One such treasure is The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu, with the intrepid Nayland Smith, "a tall, lean man with his square-cut, clean-shaven face sunbaked to the hue of coffee," who is out to stop the fiend in human form known as Fu Manchu.
I find it great fun--opium dens, poisonous centipedes, a mysterious dealt green mist, a beautiful Circassian slave, dacoits, lascars, poisoned darts, cellar dungeons--it's a later Sherlock Holmes and an early version of James Bond. And the book includes illustrations from the moving picture!
Quite a bit tamer is Grace Harlowe's Fourth Year at Overton College. The eighth in a series about the redoubtable Grace, the book gives a look at college life for girls in the teens of the last century. There are little rivalries, progressive dinner parties, masquerades, plays and play-writing competitions, but scant mention of classes or courses of study.
Grace does a mild bit of sleuthing when she recognizes a criminal from one of her previous books. And when a "newspaper girl" who is a rather prickly member of her class, writes up the event and includes Grace's name after being asked not to, the rest of the book is devoted to turning this unpleasant girl around and making her see what true college spirit is.
My grandmother always lamented that she hadn't been able to go to college. I wonder if she read these books--she was just the same age as Grace.
The back of the book gives a fascinating indication of the many popular books available for young people at the time. I'm sure, like Nancy Drew, they were written by syndicates of hard-working, underpaid, ink-stained scribblers
Touchingly earnest, the lot of them.
College girls, class of 191_, out for a stroll.
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