 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Burns, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Commission's weekly online event where we cover anything that may be of interest to librarians across the state and across the country. We do any sort of topics, presentations, book reviews, mini-training sessions, anything that we can think of. If it's related to libraries, we'll put it on the show. We do these sessions every Wednesday morning live at 10 a.m. central time, and they are free for anyone to come on to watch, last about an hour, give or take, depending on our session, and they are all recorded as well. So if you're unable to join us at Wednesday mornings, that is fine. You can always go onto our website and watch our recordings of all of our sessions. We have Commission staff here from the Nebraska Library Commission that do sessions, and we do bring in guest speakers sometimes as we have this morning. On the line with us, I have Lindsay Tomsu, who is the teen coordinator at La Vista Public Library up near Omaha. Hi, Lindsay. Hi. She said hello. And she's going to talk to us today about youth series books. Cool things about them. Nancy Drew is there in the title. Yeah, I read those when I was a teen, absolutely. But I'm sure there's many others that I was not aware of. So Lindsay's going to be presenting that for us this morning. So I will hand over to you, Lindsay. You can go and take it away and do your presentation. OK, sounds good. Great. Hi, everybody. As Krista said, my name is Lindsay Tomsu, and I'm the teen librarian at the La Vista Public Library. What I'm going to be presenting to you today was actually a lecture I gave back in September at the Eastern Library System and South Eastern Library System's youth retreat that is held in Ashland every year. And a lot of people kind of said that it was the surprise hit of the event, and I was asked to do it as a webinar as well. So a lot of people learned things, so I hope that you all walk away with some new stuff that you've never known before. So to get started, basically, let me move my slide. OK, that does not work. OK, Krista. If you try and click on the slide again to see if you sometimes if you're using good to webinar, it thinks you're using it instead. If not, there you go. OK, sometimes the arrows and it wasn't working. Yeah, sometimes it will have a little technical, you know, wonkiness there. But yeah, OK, starting again. Yes. In the beginning, series books were often classified by librarians and critics alike with the following terms. They were called worthless, soared, sensational, trashy, harmful, and the menace to good reading. In actual articles that were published in the 1920s and 1930s, such quotes as the following actually appeared. Series books are utter trash that would not grace the shelves of public libraries. If children want to read these books, they can spend their own money on them. And it's very interesting because while one assumes that the chief goal of a librarian is to promote a person's freedom to read, it has actually not always been that way. There was a time a long time ago when librarians felt that they had to censor certain forms of youth literature from children and young adults because they thought that youth's reading materials shaped their minds. So it was the duty of the librarian to make sure that they read nothing but wholesome literature. The idea that the youth should only have access to such quality books led to the suppression of youth series books that were judged to be unwholesome. And of course, the most unwholesome of all was the series book. And just to give you a little bit of background as to how I started my research, I've always been very much interested in the history of youth literature. And when I started my master's degree in my general introduction course, we were allowed to write a research paper on any aspect of librarianship. So I decided that I was going to do the Newbury controversy, which is the whole popularity versus literary merit. And while I was researching, I saw a lot of articles written by book critics and librarians from the 1920s and 1930s. And I noticed a constant hatred towards series books. And that's where such quotes came from. And it kind of seems like that was a dark period in the library's freedom to read type history. And so I realized that in all the books that I read about the history of youth literature, that series books were constantly ignored and barely ever mentioned at all. So that eventually led to the thesis that I'm working on, which I will kind of give you a little bit of a background of. And in doing so, I'm going to split my presentation into two parts. The first part is I'm going to give you just a general short history of series books and how they came about. And then the second half, I'm going to tell you a little bit about my research and how series books are important not only to the history of youth literature in general, but as well to American history and pop cultural studies too. So to begin with a short history of series books. Before series books, as we know them today actually started, there were some early and influential predecessors to the series book form. And these include Jacob Abbott. He was a very prolific author of books for youth. He mainly focused on histories, religious texts, and a few science stories. His biggest contribution to the early forms of series books was a number of books called the Rolo books. These books focused on a young boy named Rolo and his friends. And they started out with the general topics such as Rolo at school, Rolo at home, Rolo at work, Rolo at play. And then turned into a long running series that actually combined Abbott's desire to teach nonfiction topics to children as Rolo began to travel the world and to visit different countries and learn about them. And here's a slide kind of showing the frontispiece to one of the original Rolo books. And then on the right you can see Rolo's trip to Europe. So he traveled all over the world. The second predecessor to youth series fiction was much, much, much more popular. And that was William Taylor Adams. He was more famously known as Oliver Optik, which is a pretty cool pseudonym you write under. He actually was a Massachusetts state register and teacher for the Boston Public School System for more than 20 years. So he had a lot of firsthand knowledge and exposure to young children, which made his writing for them very realistic and therefore very popular. He actually wrote more than 100 books total, many of which were considered kind of series of four to six styles apiece. And most of his little books featured the same type of characters and the same type of town or location. And he touched on a number of different topics. He wrote about boating, yachting, the army and the Navy. His most popular little series was one that was called The Boat Series. And he really, really liked the ability to be able to share his knowledge about traveling and stuff. So one of his other series was called The Young American Abroad Series, where he took his characters to far away places like Russia and Turkey in Greece. And so a little picture here. That's the frontispiece to one of his Riverdale story books. And an example of one of his books, The Sailor Boy. And so he was super popular. But my favorite predecessor is Horatio Algio Jr. And he actually wrote more than 150 books in his lifetime that all focused around what became known as the luck and pluck formula for series books. He felt bad for all the children that he saw who were orphaned and forced to be working on the streets barely surviving. So he ended up writing a bunch of books that were essentially rags to riches stories. He wrote about these impoverished boys that he saw. And their rise from their poor backgrounds to lives of middle class security and comfort, basically, because these characters displayed luck and pluck. Which to him meant that they were hardworking, honest, determined, and courageous enough to be able to move up in society. His most famous story was called Raggedick, which actually eventually became a series itself about other similar boys and their rise in society. And so there on the left you can see a picture of the Raggedick series. And then an example on the right of how his luck and pluck formula actually became a series of its own. However, series books, as we know them today, actually began in 1899 with the birth of series fiction through Edward Stratemeier and his Stratemeier syndicate. Edward Stratemeier was born in 1862 and died in 1930. Just barely seen the release of two of his most famous series that everybody still knows today, The Hardy Boys, which first appeared in 1927, and Nancy Drew, which first appeared in 1930. Stratemeier grew up in a family that wasn't really too excited about his passion for writing. His father owned a general store, tobacco pharmacy type thing, and expected Edward, like his two older brothers, to go into the family business. However, Stratemeier really all he wanted to do was write. So he ended up ignoring his parents and decided to follow his dream. And he ended up getting his first story published in a children's magazine. And he went to his father with the check for $75 and was super proud and was like, look what I did. And his father finally began to encourage him because back in that time, $75 was quite a lot of money. So he finally had the blessing to go on and keep creating the books that he wanted to write about. And so while he spent most of his childhood writing and crafting stories, he eventually started working for Street and Smith, which was one of the biggest dime novel publishers of all time essentially. And through his writing and everything there, he ended up meeting his idol, which was Horatio Alger Jr. And to him, he hit it big when Alger died and Stratemeier was asked to continue ghost writing, Alger's unfinished manuscripts. And to him that was the biggest honor that could ever be asked of him. And so he got a lot of exposure writing the early type of series books by finishing Alger's books. Series books, as we know them today, began in 1899 with the publication of his first series book, which was the Rover Boys series. And the first one was called The Rover Boys at School. And he wrote it under the pseudonym Arthur M. Winfield. And this series was basically about the adventures of three brothers, Tom, Sam, and Dick Rover, who were students at a military boarding school. They were very adventurous. They liked to play pranks. They were often unshaperoned with no adults around, so they were getting into mischief and running a foul of authority figures and the occasional criminal, but nothing bad ever happened. And the series was also pretty well known for incorporating the emerging technology of the era, such as the automobile, the airplane, and also music events, such as World War I. Like other juvenile fiction of the era, the books, unfortunately, also used very exaggerated ethnic stereotypes and dialect humor. So of course, that was one of the downsides to the series. But the first 20 books of the series, because there were 30 total, were about the original rovers. And eventually, Strattemire, because the books were so popular and the kids didn't want them to end, he started to age the boys. And they got married. They had kids of their own. So the last 10 books of the series were actually referred to as the second series, which features the children of the original Rover Boys, Fred Jack and the twins Andy and Randy. So the Strattemire Syndicate was actually created with the publication of the first Rover Boys and lasted well after Strattemire's own death in 1930. It lasted until 1987, nearly 100 years later, when it was finally acquired by Simon and Schuster. So what was the Strattemire Syndicate? Essentially, it was the first bookpackager to have its books aimed at young readers rather than adults. The syndicate was very, very successful. And at the time, they believed that the overwhelming majority of books that youth read in the United States were actually syndicate productions. Edward basically formed the syndicate when he realized that he himself, even though he probably would have liked to, couldn't individually write all the new stories for all the new series that he was creating. He just had too many ideas. So he ended up devising a system where he farmed out the stories to ghost writers while he was able to keep the editorial control and all the rights to the stories. At a time when most of the youth books were aimed at moral instruction or family stories, the syndicate really wanted to specialize in producing books that were meant to be entertaining. In Strattemire's view, it wasn't really the promise of sex or violence that made such reading attractive to youth. It was the thrill of feeling grown up and having a desire for a series of stories that were about familiar characters that were similar to their own lives that they could really relate to. And this desire Strattemire believed could be harnessed for profit to have a very successful publishing company. So in founding the syndicate, he aimed to really produce books in an efficient fashion and to write them in such a way that they would be super popular. In 1930, Strattemire died of a heart attack. And the syndicate was actually inherited by his two daughters, Harriet and Edna. Edna ended up selling her share to Harriet within a few years. And Harriet ended up introducing a variety of new series that proved to be popular as well, such as the Dana Girls, Tom Swift's Junior, and the Happy Hollisters. In 1950, Harriet single-handedly began substantially revising old volumes in the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys series, updating them by removing outdated references and racial stereotypes, things like that. And in doing so, in some of the books, actually, the entire plots were completely cast off. And the revision became a totally brand new book from its original. One of the reasons why she actually started doing this was pressure from the publishing company, Grossop and Dunlap, who was the primary publisher of most of the Strattemire books, because they really felt that the racism needed to be deleted. However, Adams actually felt that that was unnecessary, but she went ahead and did it anyway. And actually today, most readers who grew up reading Hardy Boys or the Nancy Drews were actually reading the 1950s revisions and not the originals. In the late 1970s, Adams decided that the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys should go into paperback form, because the hardcover market was no longer what it had been. And so she actually approached Simon and Schuster and asked if they wanted to start publishing the books in paperback. This angered Grossop and Dunlap, who ended up suing them for breach of contract, copyright infringement, and unfair competition. This actual court case let the world know for the first time ever that the Strattemire syndicate existed, which was interesting, because they started way back in the early 1900s, and they had gone that long, because they had kept such great links to keep their existence hidden from public. And the ghost writers were actually contractually obligated to never really veiled our authorship. And for the first time ever, people knew that Caroline Keane and Franklin Dixon were not real people. And so Grossop and Dunlap ended up getting awarded the rights to Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys for the volumes that they had published in hardcover, which are two collectors referred to as the core books, which are numbers 1 through 57. They were told that they would remain all rights to those books, but they had to keep publishing them in hardcover only, while the rest of the rights for the series moved to Simon and Schuster, who could make new volumes and new stories in paperback form. Adams finally died in 1982. And in 1987, after years of trying to get her to sell the company to them, Simon and Schuster finally was able to purchase this syndicate. And they turned it over to a company called Megabooks, which was a book pack cajure at the time, to handle the writing process for new volumes in the popular series. And even today, still, many people think Franklin Dixon and Caroline King are real people. My teams were actually surprised when I told them that they are fake. And one of them asked me the interesting question of, if they were real people, how old would they be if they were still alive today? And if we guessed that they were maybe 30 when they started to write the books, most of them would probably be about 115 years old today, which is pretty old, because they've been around for a long time. So basically, also, there were certain rules for writing for the Strachemire syndicate. And they were based on the practices that Strachemire began with his first series, The Rober Boys. And the syndicate was kind of like the fight club. The first rule is you don't talk about it, obviously. The authors were under strict confidentiality clauses that didn't break until the lawsuit in the 1970s. And so that lasted for a long time. Of course, all the books had to be part of one of the established series. A lot of times, to establish more quickly if a series was going to be successful and popular, what they did was they released the first several volumes and published them together as what became known as a breeder set. This is why, actually, for collectors, such as myself, the first volume or two isn't actually as valuable as the later volumes because of these breeder sets. Those first volumes were printed in such huge volumes to get out there and try to recruit new readers and see how popular the series would be. Of course, obviously, all those books had to be written under a pseudonym. Strachemire felt that this was great for providing a continuity of authorship. So even if an author died, that person really wouldn't have died. And they could also disguise the fact that the series were written by multiple ghost writers. And they could publish them even quicker if there was more than one person writing the book. The books for the first time in youth literature in general were actually formatted and constructed like the contemporary adult books on the market of the day. So kids and teens would feel like they weren't reading childish books because they looked more like the adult books they saw their parents reading. The books all had to be of a predictable length, which the original ones were about 200 to 250 pages. Of course, the chapters all had to end on a cliffhanger to keep the readers reading. And each book usually began with a quick series recap to promote the books and made end with a preview of the next volume to encourage the repeated readers coming back for more and more. Stratomyre, also probably because of the fact that he knew the books weren't viewed very highly by adults, wanted to make sure that they were priced at prices that his readers could afford themselves if they had to buy it. So most of his books, which were very sturdy, hardcover books, were priced at 50 cents rather than the more common $1.25 of the era. And lastly, he decided after the popularity of the Rover Boys started dwindling when they got older and got married and had kids that all his characters from then on would not age or marry. They would just kind of stay hovering at a teenage age so that their adventures could continue indefinitely, basically. So real quickly, I want to kind of just show you some of the famous syndicate characters. Obviously, we've got the Rover Boys, which we talked about. They ran for 30 volumes total. We've got the Bobsy Twins, which a lot of people are surprised to find out, actually began in 1904. So they were around for a long time. I was a big reader of the Bobsy Twins, yes. My sister and I, yes, we were all over those. And so then we've got Tom Swift, who's the famous boy inventor. He ran for 40 volumes. And then Ruth Fielding was another popular stretch of my art girl. She predates Nancy Drew because she started in 1913 and she ran for 23 volumes. And she's kind of special because in a time when girls were told you can just be mothers and housewives and that's all, Ruth Fielding actually, in her progress in her series, ended up going to California and working in the emerging film industry. So it was very interesting to see a positive female role model for girls in such an early time. Of course, the most famous ones, we have the Hardy Boys. As I stated, they started in 1927 and have not been out of print since then. They've had more than 10 different sub-series for about a total of 500 books to date. And over on the far right, you can see the Hardy Boys Adventures, which I'm very excited about because in February they are relaunching both Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew and kind of taking them back to their roots and making it clear that they are teenagers and the series are going to be at teenagers and not younger children. So I'm very, very looking forward to this. And of course, Nancy as well. And you see the Nancy Drew Diaries, which is the new revamping of her. So Nancy actually has had more books published than the Hardy Boys. She's had 10 different sub-series and is approaching 600 books total, which leaves us to wonder what kind of legacy did Stratomire leave behind? Because of his strict rules that he had in place, he really truly defined the series book as we are familiar with them. Rather than stressing moral virtues or family life that was common in the books for youth at the time, Stratomire tried to cram his with action, danger and suspense. He wanted his characters to enjoy freedom. So a lot of times they didn't have adults supervision. They used cars, planes, boats, motorcycles to get around. For girl series, this was definitely a change from the atmosphere of many other 19th century stories where domestic scenes pretty much dominated. And of course, Nancy Drew was the dominant girl series of his whole firm. And in her original form in the 1930s, she was actually very much a feminist and very independent girl. Unfortunately, most readers know her today only from the 1950s revisions that Harriet did, where she felt that Nancy was a little too independent and not enough girly girl. So she ended up curbing a lot of Nancy's freedom in those revisions. In all, the Stratomire sin to get produced over 1200 books in 125 different series under approximately 100 different pseudonyms. And so Stratomire's biggest legacy to date has pretty much been the fact that he set the stage for future syndicates. That because he wasn't really the only syndicate that was around. And the most famous syndicate that he helped set the stage for was 17th Street Productions. They began in the 1970s and pretty much held rain over the teen book market in the 1980s and 1990s. And they were very famous for being very girl centered in their series. And they created a number of classic girl series, including the wonderfully epic Sweet Valley Canon, which ran for more than eight different sub-series and has had to date nearly 600 books written under the name of Francine Pascal, who was a real woman who did create the idea, but did not write all 600 books, of course. Let's see. A lot of people today, since we've got a lot of series books for children and teens being published, would be surprised to know that 17th Street Productions still actually exists, but they are better known today as Alloy Entertainment. Alloy Entertainment is the actual book packaging division of Alloy Media and Marketing, which is an American provider of media programs. Alloy is the leading producer of the unfortunately named Chick-Lit style of novels created for young adult girls among their most popular series today include Vampire Diaries, Gossip Girl, The Click, Pretty Little Liars, Private, you know, all that stuff. Those are all actually ghost-written. But unlike the secrecy of the Stretch Meyer Syndicate, Alloy Entertainment actually does their business in a different way. They do conceive of the ideas for these series and are then responsible for hiring the writers and the editors who are produced the finished product. But the big difference here is that the individual authors do get actual credit for writing the book, even though they didn't come up with the idea themselves. So that leads me to the second part of my lecture for you today, which is why should we even study series books? And back if you remember earlier on, I said that, you know, when I was researching my new very paper, I noticed a lot of negative comments towards series books throughout history. And that's when I started investigating a little more to see if I could find anything that was scholarly that was written about series books. That was maybe from a positive point of view. And to date, pretty much, the only scholarly articles that are written, you can occasionally find one, like Feminism and Nancy Drew, that kind of thing. But most of the articles that were actually written were written by collectors themselves who were very, very passionate about the books and wrote very high quality scholarly pieces for fan-created collector magazines. And so a lot of these, you're not gonna find in academic databases and universities because they were fan-made. But the level of scholarship and passion behind wanting to prove why these series books are important is there in those articles. And the only actual book published to date that's really focusing about scholarship on series books was a book by a researcher named Paul Dean that was called Merers of American Culture, where he talked about why series books are important to American history. And unfortunately, that book was published in 1991, which is more than 20 years ago. And so my research kind of stems from what Dean's book was about because here are these series books that were ignored because they were thought to be trash, yet no matter how you look at it, these books got youth reading. I mean, they were very, very popular. I mean, everyone who's probably listening to me now read a series book when they were younger. And clearly reading that book didn't turn you off of reading for your whole entire adult life. The reason why series books, I believe, shouldn't be ignored scholarly is because they're actually, when you think about it, and investigate them, wonderful cultural records of American history and pop culture. Because many of these series books, especially those written pre-1980s, were written by ghost writers for syndicates. Many of these books were technically plotted by corporate entities and not individuals. So more widespread American beliefs and values were actually being placed in these books, and whether or not the youth reading it realized it, they were actually picking up on certain cultural clues that would tell them how to behave and act. A prime example would be the early examples of the very domestic stories. The boys could play sports, but the girls had to do sewing or play with dolls. Gender roles were being expressed to them through the books that they were reading. So these books, I believe, are excellent for studying American history because they are very much products of the time that they were written in. I have found in my studies so far that most series books can be categorized into decade periods in which the themes and the values that are presented in the series books of those years mimic the issues, concerns, and values that we're facing America and its people at that time. So for the second half of my presentation, I want to just give you a short decade-by-decade look at what was going on in America during those times and how those events were actually reflected in the series books at that time, which shows how these books aren't just trash to be thrown aside, but in fact are rich cultural artifacts that should be used to help us learn more about American history. So we start off with the 1900s and the 1910s. Prior to this time period, most books that youth read were actually books published for adults that the youth kind of circumvented and grabbed as their own, so things like Treasure Island, Gulliver's Travels, those kind of things. Obviously the idea of a specific type of literature for youth came about when John Newberry decided to try to write some entertaining books for kids, but most early series books from this time period focused around moralistic and religious tales, family stories, which is what the early Bobsy twins were. It was nothing but family stories. They didn't originally solve mysteries, boarding school stories, and a lot of books that promoted the taming of the wild or had a connection with the Boy and Girl Scat movements. A lot of World War I type series books were also used and the growing interest in motorcars and film technology was also expressed in a number of these books. And going back to the original first series, you know, as we know it, The Rover Boys was set in a military school, but the difference was that Stratomir wrote it to entertain and not to moralize. And so popular series from this time period include Elsie Dinsmore, who was a very prudish little girl, and most of the stories in this series really focused on constant moral conflict between her Christian principles and her family loyalty, that kind of thing. Of course, we have The Rover Boys. We know all about them already. Tom Slade, Boy Scout, was actually one of the first Boy Scout books to be officially endorsed by the Boy Scouts of America. And then another example is The Outdoor Girls. This series focused on the activities of a group of girls who formed a camping type club. And this volume in particular shows, you know, how a lot of the series books were starting to incorporate technology of the day because here, The Outdoor Girls get to go in a motor car, which is super fancy. And you might notice that the series is written by Laura Lee Hope, who of course was the house name that wrote The Bobsy Twins as well. Then we move into the 1920s and 1930s. This is when Stratomires books were starting to totally dominate the market. So a lot of the books featured very independent characters. They started to move away from family and school stories and with the popularity of Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, mysteries started just popping up everywhere. Of course, while not all series started with mysteries, many eventually fell into that genre. So that's why you might see some of the original ones like The Bobsy Twins that were very family oriented. All of a sudden started solving mysteries in every single book because that's what sold. And we see, of course, more series focusing on film and radio technology. And we start to see a bunch of books that feature what is called the exotic style, which is basically young adventurers, mainly boys of course, going off to different countries and cultures and experiencing these different areas of the world that are completely different from what they're growing up in. So it was a very exciting type of series for readers to read. And then in a lot of girls books, we started seeing a lot of the whole flapper culture, kind of being expressed in girls' fashion and girls' attitudes. And some popular series of that time is of course, Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. Got the Radio Boys there. They were all about radio technology. Tom Swift, once again, famous boy inventor. He traveled around the world to get inspiration for his inventions. And then down there in the corner is Grace Harlow, who was a very, very popular girl. She actually had four different sub-series. She was one of the few girl series that was popular for aging. She started off with her series where she was in high school. And then she went to college and had her series there. And then she was kind of a predecessor to the independent Nancy Drew because she actually went and traveled around the world and did stuff. And remarkably, she actually got married and everything and had a baby, started a family, but didn't let that stop her traveling and her independence and stuff. So she's one of those characters that really stands out as a very unique example of a girl that doesn't just have to be a happy little homemaker kind of thing. The 1940s and the 1950s were pretty much dominated, especially by the world, the Second World War. Also during this time period, essentially, a lot of the series, you would see the boys going off to fight in the war for their country and be patriotic and a lot of girls becoming nurses to take care of the men when they come back for more. This time period was also, unfortunately, the time period of the most racist series books, which led to the 1950s and the beginning of the revision to try to fix a lot of the previous decades, racial attitudes towards different races and cultures and stuff like that. Also at this time, we're beginning to see the emergence of a few science fiction series. And after the war ends, the beginnings of the Cold War start introducing some space-related stories. And due to the whole World War, a lot of the books that were published were published on paper ration paper. So for collectors, this time period is actually the hardest to get to the books because most of them did not even survive because if they did survive, the paper was very brittle, they started to fall apart, things like that. The books from this era are extremely rare to find in good condition. So some popular series, we've got Cherry Ames, who was the nurse series of all time. She was the most popular. That picture of Nancy Drew there, a lot of people will recognize that because the, as collectors call them, the glossies. The glossy blue for the Hardy Boys and the glossy yellow for the Nancy Drew were the format for the revisions that started. Rick Brandt is one of the first science fiction related series. And then you've got Mike Morrow's astronaut who exemplified the space race and stuff in series books. So the 1960s and the 1970s, once again the Cold War is still going on in America and we start to see some spies appear in children series books. Also we're going through a whole huge technology boom. So there's a lot of inventors popping up. Sports for the first time is actually finding a comeback. They were extremely popular in the early 1900s and then kind of faded away when mysteries kind of took over but they start coming back. And adventure of course is still popular. You got the kids traveling around the world and because TV is starting to become more and more common in households, the Whitman Publishing Company starts publishing a lot of TV, movie and other pop cultural character tie-in series books which sell like mad. So a few examples there in the top corner you see Christopher Kuhl, teen agent who was essentially James Bond for teens. Chip Hilton, he made a comeback with his sports books. I mean Chip Hilton would play every single sport known to man and succeed at it. And he actually started in the 1940s and so he came back with the vengeance in this time period. This booster was another popular adventure boy and then you see some examples of the Whitman books. So you've got Annette Funicello, Shirley Temple, all those kind of things. There was books from Hawaii Five-O, The Monsters, all types of stuff. If they were a popular icon of the time, Whitman probably published a book about them. The 1980s and the 1990s saw finally towards the end of the 80s, the end of Cold War and the threats and everything, but still there was an interesting duality that was present in series books at this time period because you saw the emergence of romance which was kind of there to help escape the threat of nuclear war that America had been facing for years and then the opposite side was horror that reflected the fear of a possible nuclear war that America had been experiencing for years. So you had this interesting fight between the romance books and the horror books. Also during this time period, we finally see spin-offs of popular series for younger readers and a lot of rip-offs as well and series books start to go a little more violent and a little skew, a little older to attract new readers and keep the older ones that were starting to grow up and be a little too old for those babyish books. So during this time period, of course, Sweet Valley was the reigning romance champ and the introduction of RL Science Fear Street was the reigning horror series. And then on the other side, you've got the Little Sister and Goosebumps series. As you probably know, Little Sister came about because all the younger sisters of the older sisters who were reading Baby Sears Club were starting to read Baby Sears Club, so they made Little Sister, same with Goosebumps. All the younger kids were starting to read Fear Street, so they created Goosebumps as a more tame version of the horror genre for younger readers. And the 2000s of present day, the attitude towards series books finally changed in 1997 when people all of a sudden started going, oh my God, this book is getting kids to read. And all of a sudden, series books after nearly 100 years started getting attention for being good towards literature, for getting kids to read. And of course, if you're smart on your time periods, you'll know that the book that did this was the publication of the first Harry Potter. So we have Harry Potter to thank for series books kind of coming back with a vengeance and starting to be recognized as not being bad for the kids who are reading them. Technology gets better and better as we know, and so we're seeing a lot of revisions of other classic series and the influx of the interactive series, like the 39 clues where you read the book and then you get online and do activities to go with it. Other new trends that we are seeing is a lot of Rich Bratz meme teens type books. The paranormal and dystopian worlds are dominating and the introduction of the illustrated novel, like Impe Kid and things like that. And as we probably all know, if we are all involved in collection developments of any way, series are really dominating literature for kids and teens today, which is led to the actual relaunching of a number of other classic series from ages ago. So a little picture of some of the popular series, of course, Harry Potter, 39 clues, Gath of the girl, Impe Kid, Hunger Games, of course. And some examples of the relaunching. Up in the top corner up there, we've got the Vampire Diaries. Unlike a lot of people who think it's a Twilight ripoff, the Vampire Diaries actually predated Twilight by 17 years. I read L.J. Smith when I was in sixth grade. I absolutely loved her. So that's why the whole Twilight phenomena, I'm happy it just brought her back in print and got her writing again. So you see the original cover of the Vampire Diaries from the 1990s and the new one. Down in the bottom left-hand corner, you've got Christopher Pike's Last Vampire, which was repackaged and republished as thirst. And actually he's written two new books to his original series. Of course, Sweet Valley, they tried to revamp it with the confidential. So far that's got two books that features the twins 10 years after they graduate high school and college. And so the fun one down there in the bottom right-hand corner is Scholastic's Point Horror. They had this whole huge series in the 1990s and the picture of Fun House is one of the examples. All of the titles were one word. It was just one word that told you exactly what was going on to Fun House. Obviously, it's a creepy Fun House and the covers were horrible and they're actually relaunching them in January with more of a technology bent to the horror stories and their first attempt at that is Wickedpedia, which is the title is just as bad and the cover is just as bad. It just totally invokes that 1990s feel and I can't wait to read it to see if the writing is just as bad as well. So, let's see. So that's basically kind of a very, very short, you know, concise version of what was going on in America during those decades and how the series books reflected that time period. And so now I'd like to, before I open it up to any questions, I'd like to give you a few little fun facts that you probably don't know. But if we're gonna talk about series books at all, I need to introduce you to these two people. The man on the left is Leslie McFarlane who was more famously known as the original Franklin Dixon who wrote the original Hardy Boys books. He actually is the one that came out during the court case in the 1970s and was the first author of the syndicate to break his silence and say, I wrote these books. The lady on the left, I mean, right, is Mildred Wirtbenson and you can call her the original Caroline King. She actually was a very famous journalist. She lived in Iowa for most of her life and she wrote her first Nancy Drew when she was 24 and it's because of her that the original Nancy from the 1930s was a very go-getter type girl who wasn't gonna conform to gender stereotypes and stuff because Mildred herself was like that. She was a journalist, she was out there, all that kind of stuff. Unfortunately, she was a little sad that Nancy kind of got more feminized and more girly girl so she ended up going on to write her own series under her own name, which is one of my favorite series called the Penny Parker Mysteries which a lot of critics have actually said are on par with like an Agatha Christie or Sherlock Holmes mystery and Mildred always said, this is how I would have written Nancy Drew if I had had full control. So she is a very, very fun series. Next I'm gonna ask you guys a quick question. You can think about it, but what is considered the most racist series book of all time? It's an interesting thing because the few articles that have been written about series books comment on the fact that a lot of them were very, very racist. If anybody, yeah, anybody have any ideas, I wanna say you can use the questions section of your go to web on our interface to type in your ideas, your answers, see if anybody knows or has a guess. Silence, unless they're typing, yeah. Oh wait, the Bobsy Twins is one. The Bobsy Twins, the Bobsy Twins was more notorious, the original ones for the gender roles. A fun little quick side story. I read the original one that was written in 1904 and on page eight, four year old Freddie is talking with the other twins and the older boy Bert is like, I'm gonna be a soldier when I grow up and then the older girl Nan is like, I wouldn't wanna be a soldier because I wouldn't wanna have to kill people. And so little four year old Freddie goes, well, you can't be a soldier if you even wanted to because we all know girls have to be wives or typists. Of course, yes. Yeah, they're long notorious for gender stereotypes. Yes, they see other options, other suggestions, Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn or Horatio Alger. Horatio, racist, good, what's your question? Tom Sawyer was at a series though, I mean, how many? That's more one of those ones that was written for adults that the kids took as their own, you know, I mean, kind of considered a series because you got Tom Sawyer and then you got Huck Finn, you know, that kind of thing and that they are racist, as we know. Yes. But the actual answer to this question can have two answers based on how you look at it. The first is that the most racist series of all time if you count as one individual series, and this will shock you all, is the actual books that were approved by the Boy Scouts of America are some of the most racist series books of all time. The Boy Scouts won excellent organization for what they talked and everything, you know, for taking part in camping and nature activities and stuff. We do know that they have had a history of being racist and homophobic and having those attitudes, but the original books, because a lot of the scouting and everything took place in far away type areas, you know, the Boy Scouts came across some native type people and therefore a lot of racist attitudes were presented in these books which is shocking because you're like, not the books that the Boy Scouts have approved. The other answer to that is the most racist individual book which happens to be the 12th book in the Don Sturdy series called The Temples of Fear. And this book written by Victor Eppleton, which was the same house name as the Tom Swift books, was about Don Sturdy who kind of like Tom Swift is a young, brilliant explorer, adventure type. And in this volume, Don and his fellow party mates which include like his uncle and his best friend are after some sort of natural resource that Don thinks he needs for this new invention of his. And so they go down to some South American type country and they meet a tribe of primitive people that seem to be modeled on a stereotype of the Mayan culture. And these people, you know, have not seen outsiders and so they're kind of scared and so they kind of capture Don's whole party. And Don just jumps to the conclusion and thinks, oh my God, we are going to be human sacrifices for these bloody primitives. And so they decide that they have to break free and get away from these horrible cannibals. And so they do that by hurtling dynamites into the groups of Mayans that are congregated at a narrow tunnel of the temple where they worship at. And so here's an actual quote from the book that says, those who had escaped destruction cowered back at the farther end of the room, all desired to fight having gone from their minds. Why try to cope with these mighty white men who hurled thunder and lightning from their hands? And needless to say, at length, the tribe decides to try and fight back. And a few pages later, not only have many of them literally blown themselves to pieces because they don't understand how dynamite works, you know? Their temple is left in utter ruins and most of their tribe is dead now. And so basically, you know, he's darn near committed genocide of a whole entire native tribe. And most shockingly well, the sturdy party, you know, instead of being sad about all the lives lost, are sad about the destruction of the beautiful temple which designs on it, they describe its pricing. But of course, there's not a single concern for the hundreds of people whose body parts are lying all over the place. And so, yeah, that ended up being the most racist individual theory book of all time. And it's very racist. And of course, the picture there is the actual frontispiece that was in the book showing the whole temple blowing. The explosion, yes. And so my next little trivia question is what could be considered the most violent series of all time? That one? No. Pretty violent, yes. That particular scene, yes. Anybody have any ideas for the most violent series of all time? Nothing coming through yet. Oh, the Hardy Boys? Close. Got a couple of people at the Hardy Boys, yeah. A lot of those mystery type things that I remember reading, some of those and mostly Nancy Drew, yeah, some very dangerous situations they got into, definitely, I would say, but don't know if that would kind of, what we're talking about, violence, yeah. But yes, the most violent series of time, very, very close, is the Hardy Boys case files, which was the series that was written in the 1980s that was more violent and aimed at the older teen audience to try to keep them. And unfortunately, Strathamire, if he was alive to see the birth of this edgier Hardy Boys, he probably would have died of a heart attack again. Because he was very much, I mean, if there's one thing you can say about Strathamire, it's that his books were entertaining without having bad language or lots of violence. He was more about suspenseful situations. He actually hated violence. So the case files, as evident by the cover here of the very first volume that on Target, introduced a very different Frank and Joe to readers. In the very first few pages of the book, Joe's longtime girlfriend, technically of more than 60 years and 90 books, is killed in a terrorist bomb that was planted in the car of the Hardy Boys and was meant for them. And this is the first time ever in the entire history of series books that a continuing series character has died of any cause, yeah, natural or violent. And what follows throughout the rest of this entire series is two very different Hardy Boys. They are vengeful brothers who are basically bent on revenge, who have no qualms about carrying weapons and using violence to nab their criminals. Paul Veen, when he wrote his book on series books, actually did a study of this series in regards to violence and everything. And what he found was that violent fight scenes typically averaged about six pages and each book had at least six of them. So on average, each case file's book spent more than a quarter of its pages giving excruciatingly detailed descriptions of different violent acts. So yes, poor Hardy Boys, they ended up growing up. And my last little question, is does anybody have any idea what the most valuable series books of all time are? Oh, you mean like two collectors or? Because one of the hardest parts about doing the research on the series books is because a lot of them were considered trash by adults and stuff. Most of the kids bought them with their own money and then passed them around to their friends and then they were thrown away. I mean, most of them that are out there for collectors, they either grew up on them and they're like 80, 90 years old now and they have their original ones, or they're collectors who are trying to sell a 1970s glossy Nancy Drew calling it a first edition. No. So there are a few books that are very, very rare or valuable. One of the guesses, could that be the Oz books? The Oz series? Those are valuable, yes, but not the most valuable. There are a lot of series collectors who are very big for his books because he not only wrote to the Oz books, he actually did write other children's series under other pseudonyms. So a lot of collectors tried to track down everything that he ended up writing. Another answer, books printed during World War II. Those ones are rare in general because of the paper back. But I'll let you know what those are now. Once again, this is one of those questions that has two answers. The first is the more logical answer, which is Beverly Gray at the World's Fair. Basically, Beverly Gray was a series that began like most girls series of the 1930s did. Beverly went through the four years of high school, so it was Beverly Gray freshman, sophomore, junior, senior. And then she hit the big mystery phase and started solving mysteries instead. And half of her series was published as hard-divers with dust jackets, but when the rights were sold to Grossip and Dunlap, they began to decide to reprint all the original books for their run of the books. So number six was at the World's Fair and the publishers decided that they were going to completely drop this book from the line, and so the original number seven became the new number six. And the reason why they decided to drop this book was because they felt the subject, the World's Fair, was going to date the book and a lot of new readers probably would have no idea what the World's Fair was anyway. And so they just said, hey, we're just gonna forget this book. We're not even gonna deal with it, which was unfortunate for some of the new readers because there were major events going on in this book that affected the volumes that came after it. So all the new readers were left with this huge gap in the storyline that made no sense. And so this is one of the rarest series books because of the fact that it only ever saw one printing and a copy of it without its dust jacket can go for about $600 while a pristine edition can go for at least 1500. And that's how rare it is. The second answer is the less logical, crazy, what can collectors think they can get for a book answer, essentially? And that is the Three Investigators series which was written by a man named Robert Arthur and it ran for 43 volumes from 1964 to 1987. These books are about three junior detectives. They were super popular because of course they're solving mysteries and these were supernatural mysteries that added a new flair to it. But the reason why these books, booksellers think that they can sell for outrageous amounts is because Robert Arthur thought that the best way to get those books out there and get them sold was by slapping Alfred Hitchcock's name on them. So he got an endorsement from Alfred Hitchcock to use his name and so that's why you see Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators. And so it's basically just because those books have Hitchcock's names left on them that people think they can sell them for outrageous amounts. And so I've seen single hardcover copies with dust jackets going for at least $80 a piece. I've seen incomplete series sets of the 1980 paperback reprints. We're talking maybe like 11 out of the 43 volumes that people want like $300 to $400 for. It's insane. So that's the illogical answer for what is the most expensive series. Wow, yeah. I would like to end with just one more little fun fact. And so basically as I've said before, yeah, series books had a 100 year history of being thought of as trash and worthless and of no value to their young readers that they corrupt their mind and all that stuff. But here's an interesting story. If anybody ever looks at you and says series books are stupid and says those same things. There was a young boy who grew up reading the Tom Swift books. As I mentioned, Tom Swift, he was the most famous boy in venture. His name was Jack Cover. He loved Tom Swift and all of his adventures. And one of the great things about the Tom Swift series was that whoever was the original Victor Appleton really tried to put science behind the inventions that Tom Swift created. So he did a lot of actual research. And so a lot of the things that Tom Swift was creating were things that could, whether or not at that time period or in the future, be things that were actually real inventions. So Jack grew up and he eventually got into science himself and started working for NASA and other places. And in the 60s, he decided he was going to try to create an invention that would help police officers. And so he started doing research and stuff and remembered a certain invention from one of his Tom Swift books. And so he ended up going back to that book and looking at it and using the ideas from that invention of Tom Swift to end up creating what he eventually created in 1976 that he named for the invention, which was, as he called it, the Thomas A. Swift and his Electric Rifle, which is better known today as the Taser. So the Taser was actually invented from an idea that appeared in a series book. For sure. And- Wow. Casting. We'd not have thought of that, no. So we would not have a Taser for our police officers and things like that if it wasn't for a series book character. See, they're not bad at all. So does anybody have any- Thank you very much, Lindsay. That was actually very cool. I didn't, like I said, I have read many series books in my life. The Bobsy Twins, my sister and I got into those. Nancy Drew, of course. We had both Nancy Drew and Hardy Boy's books equally in our house for my sister and I. And I'll admit, yes, we also read The Sweet Valley High. It was probably the least, yeah. When you're a teenager. Anybody have any questions for Lindsay? We have plenty of time here. We don't get shut down at 11 o'clock. We are a little past the hour, but that's fine. We started a little past. Yes, I'll just say, once somebody's asking about the slides, yes, Lindsay will be sending me the slides, I believe you will, to post up when we do put up the recordings. You have accessed the slides and this recording today or tomorrow. The only downside about not being able to do this in person with you guys is the fact that when I lectured at the Youth Retreat, I actually brought a lot of my series book examples and stuff and everybody got to see that. But it's like. You actually have some of the old ones. Oh yeah, I have the original Rover Boys. I have that one. I have a ton. I just ended up going to the antique store last Friday and needed to update my list so I'd be ready to know what I have and everything. And to date, I have 1,855 series books. Because I need them for my research anyway. Oh, of course. It's great to take something you love and make it into your work with Vice versa. We do have a question here. Can you comment on collection development regarding series books? Can you be a little more specific? I don't know. Yeah, what about like how should you or what are ways of doing it? We're waiting for it to clear up on that. What about the Happy Hollisters? What about the Happy Hollisters? Is that anything interesting about that series, I suppose? Oh, the Happy Hollisters. They are, to me, like the series book that stalks me. Seriously, like everywhere I go, it's like, Happy Hollisters are everywhere. They're following me. The Happy Hollisters ran for 33 volumes. They were actually the, they were written under the pseudonym Jerry West, who was actually a man with the syndicate, Andrew Spenson. He actually came to the syndicate in the 1960s and kind of became Harriet Adams' protege, essentially. He was the second in command. And that was the series that he was most famous for. Very popular general family series. They solved mysteries, too. Spenson was a bit of forward thinker when it came to his series, because he was also well-known for starting a four-book series that was called The Tulliverse, which was the first series that actually attempted to address the racial stereotypes of the past books and was about an African-American family. But yes, the Hollisters go for quite a bit of money. And you can find them all over the place. They're pretty valuable and still quite popular. Lots of people remember them. Yeah, OK, so clarification of the collection development question is, should we just get the most recent series? Aren't some of the older ones out of print, so we wouldn't be able to get them anyways? What's the recommendation on which ones that would be good to try and look for? You talked a lot about old ones here, but there are current ones as well. Yes. Well, I talk mainly about the old ones, because my research is trying to show that series books shouldn't be ignored, that they're important to the history of youth literature. And so a lot of the series, you're not going to be able to find. I mean, I'm sure that you've got some remaining volumes of Hardy and the Nancy ones and Boxcock children or something like that in your libraries. And the good thing is with those series that go for so many volumes, you don't really need to read it in order. It's more, I mean, you need everything I want. But if you don't have them all, that's fine. I mean, I would definitely say, in regards to the newer series and stuff, you can't escape them. I mean, you've got Hunger Games, you've got WimpyKid, you've got all the books. I mean, it seems like everything nowadays is being published in a trilogy at least. And it's what's popular. It's series books have always been what's popular. The good thing is that they're finally getting a good reputation. And of course, you've still got a few stinkers here and there that are mainly the whole proliferation of vampire literature. Scarlet and all its knockoffs, some of them are bad. And that's going to happen in any genre. You've got to find the ones that are good or the ones that your teens are asking for. You get them starting the ones they want and then lead them to ones that you might want them to try. Exactly, exactly. And I mean, I would definitely say, in regards to the classics and stuff, some of them are past their prime. Sweet Valley is never going to get readers again. They tried to relaunch it originally. It lasted like five reprints, and that was it. But I would definitely say, if you still got kids that are gobbling up the Hardy Boys and the Nancy Drew books, I would definitely suggest getting the new relaunch that comes out in February and putting them in your teen section or tween section if you have one. Because that's a great way, since they're going back to the roots of them being more older teenagers and stuff like that, it would be a great way to get those kids who are gobbling up the old volumes and introducing them to older literature. You can be like, come on over here. There's a new one. They read the new one, and then you can introduce them to some other type of book that might fit their reading requirements back in a minute. Great, OK. Any other questions from anyone for Lindsay before we wrap up for today? You do have our contact info there. So I'm sure she'd be willing to take any questions you may have later as well. OK. A couple of comments. Thank you very much. Very interesting. This has been wonderful. Thank you very much. It was great to hear about books. Doesn't look like there's any last minute urgent questions for you right now. So I would think we will wrap up for today. Thank you. Thank you so much, Lindsay, for being here. Like I said, this was very interesting, definitely. To me, I got, you know, I said I read the series that I read, but I didn't know the whole history of it. It is very, very interesting. I'm going to start maybe looking for some of those old ones just to see what they're all about, get back into some of those old books I used to read. So thank you very much for being on Encompass Live today. I'm going to take back control here, and here we go. All right, so thank you, everyone, for attending today. And I just show you, on that final slide, Lindsay had her website. So here is what it is, an all-series-essness. I have saved it to the bookmark, to the delicious account for the Library Commission. So when the recording goes up, you'll also have a link to this, some of the research she's been doing in the area. So thank you very much for attending today's edition of Encompass Live. And I hope you'll join us next week, and we'll sign up for next week's show, Video Book Talks from Scripts to Screen. As we went done by some of our commission staff, Sally Snyder, our coordinator of children and young adult library services, Laura Johnson, our CE coordinator, and Michael Sowers for our technology part of it, talking about doing book talks, video book talks, making short videos of them as opposed to doing in-person ones, things that you could then use and post up on your website you have anywhere. So hopefully you'll sign up and join us for that next week. And also, as you can see here, Encompass Live does have a Facebook page. So if you want to follow like us on Facebook here, you can, and you'll get announcements here of any sessions that we have coming up. You'll see down here, I do announce when the next one is, just remind people and remind people the day of that it's coming up. And once our recordings are available, they are also posted on here as well so that you'll know when that's available. So if you are a big Facebook user, definitely go ahead and follow us on Facebook, Facebook.com slash Encompass Live. So other than that, we don't see any final questions coming in, we are good. Thank you very much and we will see you next time. Bye bye.