I’m retired, but I’m still an academic. My research is in a pretty obscure corner of 19th-century American culture, so this is where I organize the little bits of information as I gather it.

I focus on American Children’s Periodicals, 1789-1872 and books, especially works created by Samuel Griswold Goodrich.

Please enjoy the site, but remember that it’s entirely the creation of one person, scanning and transcribing and researching, wearing out her own copies, and paying to make the material available without advertisements.

If you’d like to feature some of these works at your site, please link to these pages. If you’d like to make them available in another format, please write to me, so we can make arrangements. Or transcribe them yourself: there’s nothing that says you can’t find your own copies to transcribe or scan!

Copyrighted material includes the papers I’ve written, my commentaries, and the specific electronic form of the documents. Feel free to save these files to disk or to print them for your own use, or to link to them. If you’re quoting this material in your own work, please remember me in the acknowledgments and let me know where to find a copy, so I can enjoy your take on the subject. If you wish copies for educational purposes, please ask me first, so I can point you to a clean copy. No permission is granted for commercial use.

How much is —— worth?

$5. (Since I’m not a dealer, I don’t try to price books. But there was a marvelous book dealer who, every time I dragged out a book he hadn’t priced, would say, “Five bucks?” He was the greatest ….)

• If you’re trying to find out the price actual book dealers have put on copies of your book, you can get an idea by looking it up at Bibliofind or Bookfinder.
• You also could see how much someone paid for it on eBay.
• If you’re trying to learn more about its author (birth and death dates, and what else they’ve written), or when it was published, the Library of Congress online catalog or the online catalog of the American Antiquarian Society are good bets.

Other things I’ve done

Papers & presentations

• “From Bobbsey Twins to Batman: Research Possibilities in the Hess Collection.” Presentation at Children’s Literature Forum, Children’s Literature Research Collection, University of Minnesota Twin Cities, 1982.
• “Choosing the Right Path: Didacticism in Choose-your-own-adventure Books.” Paper presented at Popular Culture Association Convention, Atlanta, Georgia, 1986. Available online
• “Robert Merry’s Museum and the Lure of the Sensational.” Paper presented at Popular Culture Association Convention, New Orleans, Louisiana, 1988. Available online
• “The Stratemeyers of New Jersey; or, The Secrets in the Old Archives.” Paper presented at American Culture Association Convention, Louisville, Kentucky, 1992. A quickie look at the kind of information researchers can garner from the U. S. census.
• “Death and the Readers of Robert Merry’s Museum.” Paper presented at American Culture Association Convention, Chicago, Illinois, 1994. Available online
• “Too Good to Be True: 150 Years of Mary Sue.” Paper presented at American Culture Association Convention, San Diego, California, 1999. Expanded version available online
• “An ‘Online Community’ of the Nineteenth Century.” Paper presented at Popular Culture Association Convention, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 2001. Expanded version available online
• “Samuel Goodrich and the Branding of American Children’s Literature.” Paper presented at Popular Culture Association Convention, Boston, Massachusetts, 2007. Published Dime Novel Roundup 77 (Feb 2008): 4-12. Available online
• “Reading the Covers of Some Early American Periodicals for Children.” 40-minute version presented to the Washington Area Group for Print Culture Studies, Washington, DC, 2010. 15-minute version presented at Popular Culture Association Convention, St. Louis, Missouri, 2010.
• “How Prehistoric Beasts Met Nineteenth-century American Children.” Presentation at Society for the History of Authorship, Reading & Publishing Conference, Washington, DC, 2011. Most of the material is online.

Exhibit

• “Going to War.” Exhibit at the Children’s Literature Research Collection, University of Minnesota Twin Cities, 1986. How the American Revolution, the American Civil War, & World War I were presented in popular books, comics, & magazines for children.

Blog

• So Many Words, So Little Time

Flickr account

• merry_coz

Articles

• “Fables into Picturebooks.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 9 (1984): 73-75. A survey of the way fables have been retold in picture books, for the 500th anniversary of William Caxton’s edition of Aesop’s fables.
• “Youth’s Temperance Advocate.” In Children’s Periodicals of the United States, ed. R. Gordon Kelly. Greenwood Press, 1984. The piece that started it all.
• “Jane Louise Curry.” In Twentieth-Century Children’s Writers. St. James Press, 1989. An interesting American writer.
• “Jane Langton.” In Twentieth-Century Young Adult Writers. St. James Press, 1994. A wonderful writer, especially for children.
• “Clement Moore and ‘A Visit from St. Nicholas.’ ” Introduction to A catalogue of the Editions of The Night Before Christmas from the Barbara Loftus Perrone Collection. West Chester University, West Chester, Pennsylvania, 2001. Available online
• “Midwestern children’s literature.” For Encyclopedia of the Midwest. Bloomington, Indiana: University of Indiana Press, 2006. Themes in books by midwestern writers past & present.
• “Samuel Goodrich and the Branding of American Children’s Literature.” Dime Novel Roundup. 77 (Feb 2008): 4-12. Available online

Scholarly books

• Reference Guide to Modern Fantasy for Children. Greenwood Press, 1984. From Abadan to Zyll: an encyclopedia of people, places, & things in 100 works. One of the American Library Association’s Outstanding Reference Books, 1985.
• “A Visit to Merry’s Museum; or Social Values in a Nineteenth-Century American Periodical for Children.” PhD thesis, University of Minnesota Twin Cities, 1987. Updated version available online
• Beverly Cleary. Twayne, 1991. Included in Twayne’s Women Authors on CD-ROM, 1995-whenever. Themes in the works of a major American writer.
• Letters from Nineteenth-century American Children to Robert Merry’s Museum Magazine. Edwin Mellen Press, 2001. Expanded version available online

Fiction

• The Fog’s Net. Illus. Ruth Gamper. Houghton Mifflin, 1994. A picture book now out of print.
• “How Pete and Mirelda Went to Market.” Ladybug magazine, November 1994. Onomatopoeia gone wild, with some wonderful illustrations by Margaret Sanfilippo, who draws a darn good donkey.
• The House at the Edge of Time. 2016. An adventure in self-publishing. Two boys brave dinosaurs, wolves, and an exploding volcano in a desperate search through time for an eccentric treasure hunter.
  Available at: Barnes & Noble (ebook & paperback) | Kobo | Smashwords | Amazon (ebook & paperback) | Apple | Scribd | 24symbols
• The Night City. 2018. An adventure in self-publishing. A girl finds a magical world in her own city—and danger.
  Available at: Barnes & Noble (ebook & paperback) | Kobo | Smashwords | Amazon (ebook & paperback) | Apple | Scribd | 24symbols

Computer game

• “The House at the Edge of Time.” (1989) A text adventure played in DOS—now with its very own official web page!
  Also available at Internet Archive