Antique 1911 Adventures of Bobby Orde 📖 Stewart Edward White Grosset & Dunlap Reprint

Size: 8.25 x 5.5 inches ~ Blue cloth boards with silver lettering; the spine is faded and foxed with fraying at the head and tail, corners rubbed, but the binding is sound and the text block and endpapers are complete.

📖 The Book

This is a Grosset & Dunlap reprint of Adventures of Bobby Orde by Stewart Edward White. The copyright page reads "COPYRIGHT, 1911, BY DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY," with the earlier copyright line beneath it, "COPYRIGHT, 1908, 1909, BY THE PHILLIPS PUBLISHING COMPANY" — the stories ran first in The American Magazine before White gathered them into this book. The copyright page here still reads "Printed in the United States at the Country Life Press, Garden City, N.Y." - Doubleday, Page's own model printing plant, moved out to Garden City on Long Island in 1910 and named for the company's magazine, Country Life in America. Grosset & Dunlap had the book on their list by 1920, selling it for 85 cents. Bobby is the son of the hero of White's earlier Riverman stories, growing up in a sawmill river town the book calls Monrovia — the woods, the mill, a boy's own printing press and rifle, seen at a boy's height rather than a man's.

✍️ Stewart Edward White

White was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan in 1873, the son of a lumberman, and he made his name writing the north-woods and frontier novels — The Riverman among them — that grew out of that world, before turning later in life to spiritualism. Theodore Roosevelt once called him the best man with a rifle and a pistol who ever shot at Sagamore Hill. He died in 1946 in Hillsborough, California.

🏠 Grosset & Dunlap

Grosset & Dunlap was founded in New York in 1898 by Alexander Grosset and George T. Dunlap as a reprint house, taking popular novels and putting them back into print in sturdy, affordable cloth editions — this copy's imprint sits at the foot of the spine.

🔖 What's Inside

The endpapers are printed in green and cream — trees, hills, a church spire, a fence, clouds — and a previous owner's bookplate is pasted inside the front cover, a small illustrated "Ex Libris" plate with a window, a golf bag and clubs, a fishing rod and creel, and a shelf of books. It's a nice little trace of someone who loved this book before I did.