The Secret Lives of Used Books (Tom Swift and His Jetmarine, by Victor Appleton II)
This copy of Tom Swift and His Jetmarine (1954) first belonged to Leslie Vanlandingham, reachable by phone at Rockford, TR 7–0583.
The North American Numbering Plan, which established area codes and direct dialing without the involvement of a switchboard operator, was devised in the late 1940s. The first long-distance direct-dialed call in the United States was made in 1951, and the system was phased in throughout that decade. By the early 1960s direct dialing was largely in place, which pretty well pegs this copy and Vanlandingham’s ownership to the mid-to-late 1950s.
I bought the book for my son, but he and I never actually read it. For a time, I read him a chapter or two of a Hardy Boys mystery every night, and we got through about fifteen Hardy Boys books that way. During that year or so, I would pick up stray copies of other kids’ adventure series — not only Tom Swift but also Ken Holt, The Happy Hollisters, and Tom Corbett: Space Cadet. Most of them went unread, as did a handful of surplus Hardy Boys. I started to read him a Tom Corbett novel, Sabotage in Space (1955), but where pacing and rhythm were concerned, it couldn’t hold a candle to the average Hardy Boys mystery. It was long on astronautic and bureaucratic exposition and short on narrative momentum, so we chucked it aside after several chapters and returned to the adventures of Frank and Joe.
All but one of the Hardy Boys books I read him were the revised, condensed 1960s editions put out by Grosset & Dunlap, the same ones I read as a boy. However, I did find an unbowdlerized copy of a 1927 edition of The House on the Cliff. It was a reprint put out by Applewood Books in the early 1990s. I recall reading it one night to my son and — as I worked to build tension with my delivery — coming upon the phrase “nigger in the woodpile.” Evading it broke my stride, and as I fumbled for a substitute, a trace of confusion mingled with the tension on my son’s face. I managed to recover quickly enough, and my son never queried me on whatever infelicitous alternative it was that I supplied.
