From the Preface: "The present book is a preliminary narrative of the field work of the Central Asiatic Expeditions. So Many requests for a collected account of the activities of the expeditions during the last four years have come to us that we felt it was due the public to give the story of our experience in Mongolia up to the present time."

Others:
All About Dinosars 1953: ~ Allabout Books by Random House, NY, Illustrated by Thomas W. Voter. 146 pages 

Letter from Roy Chapman Andrews (1884-1960), Explorer and adventurer, long-time curator and director of the American Museum of Natural History, in New York. He became world famous as leader of a series of expeditions to central Asia, especially Mongolia, and most feel that the movie character Indiana Jones was modeled on his life. This is a typed letter signed to Mr. J. Martin, a somewhat whale aficionado and an electrical worker at the U. S. Navy Yard, Brooklyn, New York "Replying to your letter of September 14, will say that if you care to come to the Museum in about two weeks. I will have the photograph which I took on my whale trip developed and printed, and will be very glad to show them to you. Yours very truly, R. C. Andrews
This is a one-page letter dated September 16, 1908 on an American Museum of Natural History letterhead. Accompanying this is a typed letter to Andrews from Martin, dated almost two years later (Dec. 1910)
"Will you kindly inform me on enclosed postal, at the time when your photographs of whaling scenes will be on exhibition, as I am very anxious to have an opportunity of seeing them."

Andrews plunged into Outer Mongolia, heedless of sandstorms, civil wars and armed bandits, for the sake of science

~ Virtual Explorer Society

Roy Chapman Andrews (1884-1960)-- adventurer, administrator, and Museum promoter -- spent his entire career at the American Museum of Natural History, where he rose through the ranks from departmental assistant, to expedition organizer, to Museum director. He became world famous as leader of the Central Asiatic Expeditions, a series of expeditions to Mongolia that collected, among other things, dinosaur eggs. But on these expeditions, Andrews himself found few fossils, and during his career he was not known as an influential scientist. Instead, Andrews filled the role of promoter, creating immense excitement and successfully advancing the research and exhibition goals of the Museum.

Roy Chapman Andrews (1884-1960) is often called "the real life Indiana Jones."* His life as a paleontologist was filled with adventures in many localities. He even had to deal with  bandits in the Gobi Desert! Andrews was born in Wisconsin on January 26th, 1884.He graduated from Beloit College in Beloit, Wisconsin, and moved to New York City, where he took a job at the American Museum of Natural History as a sweeper. His talents were soon recognized, and he became a member of the research staff. Andrews was interested in many subjects over his life. In 1908, he was the first person to conduct scientific studies on whales off Vancouver Island on the British Columbian coast in Canada. Andrews photographed, measured, and recorded observations about humpback, fin whales, and blue whales in the area. He also collected the skeleton of a humpback whale for the American Museum that is still there today. He used his observations to write a number of technical papers (including the first technical monograph about right whales), as well as a number of popular articles and books for children and adults. These books included All About Whales and Whale Hunting With Gun and Camera.Andrews approached his boss, Henry Fairfield Osborn, the director of the American Museum, and proposed an expedition into the Gobi Desert. This would be the first expedition into the Gobi Desert by scientists, and after Andrews and his crew left, it was the last one for many years. Andrews was interested in anthropology (the study of the origin of humans), and he felt that the Gobi Desert was the best place to find fossil evidence of the ancestors of humans. In 1927, Andrews set out on the first of four expeditions (the last was in 1933) into the Gobi. He was unsuccessful in his mission to find the ancestors of humans, but Andrews brought back many dinosaur skeletons from the Gobi. Many of these were of species that had never been discovered before. On July 23rd, 1933 Andrews made a discovery that forever changed our modern understanding of dinosaurs. He found the first recognizable dinosaur eggs! (Paleontologist Charles Gilmore from the Smithsonian Museum had actually found a layer of dinosaur eggshells in Montana, an  area that is very well known today for its preservation of eggshells, but he thought that the eggshells were actually the shells of freshwater clams. At the time, there was no evidence that dinosaurs laid eggs, and some paleontologists thought that they might have given birth to their young live, the way that mammals do.)  The area that Andrews found the dinosaur eggs in was in sediment from the late Cretaceous Period (140 to 65 million years ago), and his crew had found the plentiful remains of the herbivorous dinosaur Protoceratops scattered liberally throughout the area. This led Andrews to believe that the eggs were those of Protoceratops. On one nest of eggs, Andrews found the skeleton of a small theropod dinosaur spread over the eggs. Because he believed that the eggs belonged to Protoceratops, he assumed that the theropod dinosaur had been killed in the act of robbing the nest of the eggs. He sent the nest and the theropod skeleton back to the American Museum, where Osborn named the theropod Oviraptor, meaning "egg hunter" or "egg stealer". For years, no-one questioned that this dinosaur had been caught in the act of egg theft. In the 1990's, the American Museum sent another group of paleontologists to the Gobi Desert to dig up dinosaur bones. American Museum paleontologst Michael Novacek wrote about the 1990 to 1995 expeditions into the Gobi, as well as Andrews's earlier expeditions in Dinosaurs of the Flaming Cliffs (1996), and Time Traveler (2002). In 1993, they were able to refute the earlier, negative picture of Oviraptor. Oviraptor was the mother of the eggs that Andrews found, and she was killed as she protected her eggs! Poor Oviraptor is stuck with her "egg hunter" name (see my article "Brontosaurus versus Apatosaurus, about how biologists give animals scientific names), but maybe not her negative reputation. When Andrews returned from his last expedition into the Gobi Desert, he became the director of the American Museum for several years, but was eventually asked to step down. He was a prolific writer, writing many scientific works as well as popular books about his expeditions into the Gobi, and his other works. He died on June 3rd, 1960, having lived a very full and adventurous life. Many of Roy Chapman Andrews's books can still be found in used book stores, although they were the epitome of our understanding of paleontology and anthropology at the time of their publication, the information in them is fairly outdated, but they can make for an interesting read. The Business of Exploring, New Conquest of Central Asia (1932), On the Trail of Ancient Man, Meet Your Ancestors (1945), All About Whales, All About Dinosaurs, Camps and Trails in China, Under a Lucky Star (autobiography, 1943), An Explorer Comes Home (autobiography,1947)

Chapman Family Plot
Oakwood Cemetery, Beloit, Rock County, Wisconsin, USA

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Other:
The Happy Garden 1912.  Cassells
Finding Neverland

ANTHOLOGIES:
Boy's Book of Big Game Hunting n/r
Boy's Book of Cowboys n/r
Boys Book of Pirates n/r
Christmas Carols n/r
Comical Hits by Famous Wits n/r
Mark Twain's Boyhood Home n/r
Mother Bedtime Stories n/r
Prize Stories of 1924 n/r
Technique '94 n/r
The Arabian Nights n/r by Richard Burton?

The Merry Widow n/r  music 1907

The Rain-Girl n/r

Mr. Wellesley. As Armiger put it in the 1918 Titles: A Guide to the Right Use of British Titles and Honours "It cannot be too firmly stated that the word "honourable" is never used in speech." (Except when referring to " the honourable member")The word honourable is only used in addressing envelopes and in formal court announcements.

Lieut. Gullivar of Mars is held by most accounts to be the most likely influence on ERB’s Under the Moons of Mars , except that while widely available in England, it was not published in the United States until the 1965 Ace (F-296) edition, with cover art by Frank Frazetta. Edwin Lester Arnold was the son of the famous Sir Edwin Arnold, Orientalist, journalist (chief editor of the London Daily Telegraph), and author of the long narrative poem “The Light of Asia” (1879). E.L. Arnold (1857-1935) was born in Swanscombe, Kent, England, spent his childhood in India, and returned to England to study agriculture and ornithology. After much world travelling with his father he settled down to a job as a journalist in 1883. In 1890 his first novel, Phra the Phoenician, appeared in the prestigious Illustrated London News, in 26 parts each with a full-page illustration (it pays to have a daddy in high places). The first edition (Harper's 1890) had no illustrations since it was likely a pirated edition, but the first British edition (Chatto and Windus, 1891) did include about half the illustrations. The latter edition was reprinted in the Newcastle Forgotten Fantasy Library, Volume XI (1977). 

Phra is a novel of reincarnation in which the title character, a Phoenician merchant, sails to Britain. There he meets a beautiful barbarian druid princess, Blodwen. When Julius Caesar invades Britain, he dies after having been betrayed by a jealous druid. He wakes up 400 years later, not having aged, and, courtesy of Blodwen, with his entire past history tattooed on his body. After more swashbuckling adventures, he dies again to reawake another 400 years later, and so on. Finally, in Elizabethan times, hoping he will truly die and rejoin Blodwen in Eternity, he writes his memoirs.

The story was very popular and even reprinted by popular demand as late as 1945 (Famous Fantastic Mysteries, September 1945). Phra also spawned a number of imitations, the best known of which is George Griffith’s Valdar the Oft-Born: A Saga of Seven Ages (Pearson’s Weekly, 1910; FAX Collector’s Editions, 1972). Another excellent variation on the theme is Arthur D. Howden-Smith’s Grey Maiden (magazine, Adventure, 1926; book, Longmans, 1929, abridged version, Centaur, 1974), about an imperishable sword which is discovered and used at intervals through history. Arnold himself  reused the theme in the novelette Rutherford the Twice-Born (The Idler, 1892; in book form, The Story of Ulla, 1895), and in the somewhat tongue-in-cheek Lepidus the Centurion: A Roman of Today (1901; reprinted Arno Press). Unfortunately the latter novel’s comedic style didn’t go over well with the reading public and Lepidus was a bomb. 

It was not until 1905 that Arnold published his great Martian novel. When it received only a lukewarm welcome, he stopped writing altogether. He died 30 years later, largely forgotten. The resemblances with Burroughs’ Under the Moons of Mars are remarkable. Both Carter and Jones reach Mars by unscientific means, the former by astral projection, the latter on a magic carpet!  Both versions of Mars have very similar civilizations, down to the absence of old people and small children. Jones’ princess is Heru, and he meets the Hither People, a group remarkably similar to Burroughs’ Heliumites. John Carter’s rescue of Dejah is duplicated, as is his journey down the river Iss (in The Gods of Mars ). The return to Earth under dire circumstances at the end of the story is also common to both books. Richard A. Lupoff, in his introduction to the first American edition of the novel (Gulliver of Mars), having outlined these similarities, points out that while John Carter is a great, fearless, swashbuckling hero, Gullivar Jones is pretty much a wimp in comparison. Lupoff suggests that Carter was perhaps patterned on Phra, as these two characters are very much alike.  ~ George Dodds

A tale of a trip to Mars and of encounters with its winged inhabitants. This is one of the group of life-on-Mars tales that came out in the several years following Percival Lowell's 1908 scientific book MARS AS THE ABODE OF LIFE (Lowell was the director of the astronomical observatory at Flagstaff Arizona). Included are six plates in full color. As "Frank Aubrey" and "Fred Ashley," Atkins had written adventure romances such as THE DEVIL-TREE OF EL DORADO, A QUEEN OF ATLANTIS, KING OF THE DEAD and THE RADIUM SEEKERS, and as "Fenton Ash" he would go on to write BY AIRSHIP TO OPHIR, THE BLACK OPAL and THE ISLAND OF GOLD. 
 
 

OTHER:
A Son of the Stars ~ 1909  ~ with extensive bio./biblio notes by experts Sam Moskowitz and Darrell C. Richardson serialized in Caz' The Fantasy Collector Nos. 201-216
By Airship To Ophir (1910) (writing as Fenton Ash) 
The Devil-Tree of El Dorado: A Romance of British Guinea (1897) (writing as Frank Aubrey) 
A Studio Mystery (1897) (writing as Frank Aubrey)
A Queen of Atlantis: A Romance of the Caribbean Sea (1899) (writing as Frank Aubrey) 
King of The Dead: A Weird Romance (1903) (writing as Frank Aubrey) 
The Radium Seekers: Or the Wonderful Black Nugget (1903) (writing as Fred Ashley) 
The Temple of Fire: Or the Mysterious Island (1905) (writing as Fred Ashley) 
By Airship To Ophir (1910) (writing as Fenton Ash)
The Black Opal (1915) (writing as Fenton Ash)  aka The Big Budget 
The Island Of Gold (1918) (writing as Fenton Ash) aka The Marvel 

Biblio

The introduction to The Young Visiters was written by J. M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan. In Britain, The Young Visiters was published by the prestigious house of Chatto and Windus; in the U.S. by George H. Doran. The book was published without corrections for spelling or punctuation. 

The first third of the twentieth century was a period of great ferment in the arts. This is the time when the arts became more abstract, this including painting, sculpture, music and the literary arts as well. Many of the period’s finest writers, particularly in Europe, began complex literary experiments, including jettisoning standard grammatical forms and typographic conventions: The Death of Vergil by the German author Hermann Broch, Finnegan’s Wake by the Irish author James Joyce, and The Sound and the Fury by the American writer William Faulkner are classic examples of authors stretching the limits of standard grammatical form. Publishing children’s writing without corrections in 1919 spoke, not to indulgence or a lapse in standards, but to a courageous look at the achievements of naïve artists, of artists working without a full complement of technical skills, but with something to say and the will to say it. 

When we published Crippled Detectives by Lee Tandy Schwartzman in 1978, it was no longer possible, if one wanted the work to be taken seriously, to publish a child’s manuscript virtually as is. Or at least so it seemed to us then, and still does today. We standardize spelling and punctuation in Stone Soup (and did so in Crippled Detectives), although we do leave grammatical innovations, as we did in the work of the Vietnamese boy Huong Nguyen. 

As you read The Young Visiters  you will find yourself immersed in the world of popular romantic fiction of the first decades of this century. Re-reading The Young Visiters makes me feel much more tolerant of student writing that is heavily influenced by mass culture. It reminds me that we learn by copying; that the desire, and then the will to carry through with the desire to tell a story is the true underpinning that makes all great artists great. The rest of us are those who have made a list of great titles for our books, but haven’t been able to make the books to go along with them! 
http://www.stonesoup.com/ash2/ashintro.html

Ashton Excerpt: The View of the London Times (5 July 1821)
"On the occasion of Napoleon’s death, the leading English paper expressed the view of the English establishment: hatred of his despotic rule, yet a kind of sneaking admiration of his “extraordinary life.”
From J. Ashton, English Caricature and Satire on napoleon the First, 2 vols. (London, 1884): II: pp. 261-264.:
"Thus terminates in exile, and in prison, the most extraordinary life yet known to political history. The vicissitudes of such a life, indeed, are the most valuable lessons which history can furnish. Connected with, and founded on, the principles of his character, the varieties of fortune which Buonaparte experienced are of a nature to illustrate the most useful maxims of benevolence, patriotism, or discretion. They embrace both extremes of the condition of man in society, and therefore address themselves to all ranks of human beings. But Buonaparte was our enemy—our defeated enemy—and, as Englishmen, we must not tarnish our triumphs over the living warrior by unmanly injustice towards the dead.  . . . It may, we confess, be no satisfaction to the French, nor any great consolation to the rest of Europe, to know through what means it was, or by what vicious training, that Buonaparte was fitted, nay, predestined almost, to be a scourge and destroyer of the rights of nations, instead of employing a power irresistible, and which, in such a cause, none would have felt disposed to resist, for the promotion of knowledge, peace, and liberty throughout the world. . . . But he had left himself no resource. He had extinguished liberty in France, and had no hold upon his subjects, but their love of military glory. Conquest, therefore, succeeded to conquest, until nothing capable of subjugation was left to be subdued. Insolence, and rapacity, in the victor, produced, among the enslaved nations, impatience of their misery, and a thirst for vengeance. Injustice undermined itself, and Buonaparte, with his unseasoned empire, fell together, the pageant of a day."
"He put his foot on the neck of Kings, who would have put their yokes upon the necks of the People: he scattered before him with fiery execution, millions of hired slaves, who came at the bidding of their Masters to deny the right of others to be free. The monument of greatness and of Glory he erected, was raised on ground forfeited again and again to humanity—it reared its majestic front on the ruins of the shattered hopes and broken faith of the common enemies of mankind. . ."
More quotes: http://www.stanford.edu/group/ww1/spring2000/Bogdan/Essay.html

OTHERS:
Gutenberg eTexts

"To be intensely natural, yet to impart to her creations a touch of ideality which may often be invisible in real life, although existing in an imperfect medium, is one of the literary principles of that delightful writer of California stories, Mrs. Gertrude Atherton. Of her favorite field - California before the American occupation - Mrs. Atherton has made an exhaustive study, living in the old towns with the remnants of the race of which she writes, and storing up knowledge of their customs and traditions. She was born on Rincon Hill, San Francisco, and was educated by her grandfather, Stephen Franklin, who was a nephew of Benjamin Franklin. Her father was Thomas L. Horn, one of the original Vigilance Committee. As a child she composed stories, and at fifteen she wrote a play which was acted by schoolmates at St. Mary's Hill, Bienicia, Cal. Her education was completed at Sayre Institute, Lexington, Ky., and soon thereafter she was married to George H. B. Atherton, of California. 

She continued her persistent pursuit of knowledge, however, with an ambition to one day take a place in American literature. Her first published story, "The Randolphs of Redwoods," appeared in the San Francisco "Argonaut." But her best work is in her stories of old California, "The Doomswoman" and the eleven shorter ones that have been collected under the title, "Before the Gringo Came." Some of her stories have appeared in "The London Graphic," "Blackwood's" and other English periodicals, and the "London Speaker" recently referred to her as one of the pioneers of the true American literature. Mrs. Atherton, who now resides at Yonkers, N. Y., has in preparation a novel to be entitled, "Patience Sparhawk and Her Times."  From a biography of the day.