My Library -- The Tom Swifts

I think it is fair to say that the Tom Swift Jr books served as a gateway to speculative fiction for many boys from the mid 1950’s into the “space age” of the 1960’s. I didn’t hang around with girls in my Tom Swift days, so I can’t say that they didn’t also read them for certain. But I can say that my sister didn’t borrow mine. They certainly were my introduction to speculative fiction, beginning sometime when I was doing time in 5^th grade, which is when I first got into reading. I think.

I have no recollection of how I discovered “Victor Appleton ll’s” Tom Swift Jr series. Perhaps there were some Tom Swift Jr books in the classroom library, but I don’t recall that being the case. I do recall with certainty that after I became a fan, I bought most of my Tom Swift Jr books from the book department of the Gimbels department store at the South Gate mall. I can remember eagerly heading to the book department whenever we were shopping to see if a new title was available. I also remember buying one second hand at some sort of street market, a “Maxwell Street Sale” type of event. (Probably Tom Swift and His Flying Lab pictured above since it was not a new copy) I’m quite sure that I bought Tom Swift and the Electronic Hydrolung of 1961 (#18 $1) when it was first released – as it’s wrap around the spine cover was unique to the series, which, somehow, struck in my memory. The last book I bought was Tom Swift and His 3-ZD Telejector with a copyright date of 1964 which would make me 14 years old. By that time I was likely starting to read full on speculative fiction – Heinlein, Clarke, Norton et.al.

But as you can see from the photo, I did not confine myself to reading just the then current Tom Swift Jr books by Victor Appleton ll. In 1963 there was a brief craze called “Tom Swifties.” You can read about it in this Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Swifty The short version is that a book, Tom Swifties by Paul Pease and Bill McDonough, made puns out of the way the writers of the original Tom Swift books used discriptive dialog tags. The Wikipedia article has an example of the way the original books were written and then samples of dialog tags turned into puns, for example: “I love hot dogs,” said Tom with relish.” or “Stay away from that turtle!” Tom snapped. or “We just struck oil!” Tom gushed. You get the idea. I recall seeing a newspaper article about this fad, which opened my eyes to the fact that there was an older, Tom Swift series by Victor Appleton before there was the Tom Swift Jr by Victor Appleton ll series that I was familiar with. This sparked my interest, so much that my Dad drove me into downtown Milwaukee to visit the premiere used book store, The Renaissance Book Store, on Wisconsin Ave. There he negotiated a deal to buy one of each of the titles they had in stock – I seem to think, 13 of them all told, for a $1 apiece. I know that one of the books in that bundle was Tom Swift and his Motorcycle. I wrote the date I got it, 1/12/63 on the inside flap, and it still has the book store’s asking price of $2.50, so Dad got a good deal.

Strangely enough, the original Tom Swift books have had a greater impact on me, my tastes in stories, and my writing, than the Tom Swift Jr books ever did. Whereas the Tom Swift Jr book could be imagined to be taking place in the world I knew, the old books, set in upstate New York in 1910's, were a strange, fantasy world to me. While I was familiar with life in the past, as portrayed in TV westerns and old movies, anyway, these stories brought the past much closer to home. I guess the best way to put it is that they were a glimpse of the everyday life of a teenager/young man of the period – with quaint air of “old times.” And perhaps because I’d spent two weeks every summer on the dairy farm of my grandparents, which was far different than my life in the city and suburbs, I think I had just a taste of that way of life just before it faded away in the 1960’s,so the life the books described had a familiar air to it that enhanced its impact on my imagination.

I would go on to read many other books set in different eras – Sherlock Holmes’ Victorian London, Nayland Smith’s Edwardian East End, Philip Marlowe’s 1930’s LA, to name just few of the lost worlds of the past that had the power of a fantasy world in my imagination. However, Tom Swift’s world was the first.

The series started off with Tom making improvements on motorcycle he got cheap from a Mr Wakefield Damon (who blessed everything), and dealing with the obnoxious rich rival/bully, Andy Foger, plus thieves stealing his inventor dad’s plans. Travel distances were still measured in a horse and buggy speed. Like in the Jr books, Tom had a good friend, and a girl he was sweet on (and actually married, in the books, I seem to recall.) Plus some interesting reoccurring characters, like Eradicate Sampson with his mule Boomerang with all the racial stereotypes of the day, but still portrayed sympathetically. As I said, it was a whole new, a different, and a simpler never-never world. A world time had changed to fantasy.

So what do I owe Tom Swift today? Well, let’s see. I like small stories, stories about people in dangerous adventures, but not stories that involve the fate of the world or universe, just like the Tom Swift stories. I like more old-fashioned settings for my stories, even when set in the far distant future. I like the comradely of good friends, and the element of romance. The old Tom Swift books took me out of my everyday life to another semi-familiar, but different world, which is what I try to achieve with my stories. In short, they either appealed to the taste in stories I was born with, or shaped it. I can’t say which. And, well, Tom is shown wearing a snappy hat on the cover. I’ve been a hat guy all my life.

And come to think of it, I owe those old Tom Swift books one more thing – my love of old books. They were my first second hand books, and I found it intriguing to find hints of the previous owners in the books, inscriptions, signatures, etc. I have a lot of old books – books that were actually old before I bought them. I love them.

In the photo above, you can see, on the lower shelf, some more of my early reading. I wasn’t a huge fan of the Hardy Boys, but I did read them. Like Tom Swift, I like the older, original versions better than the updated ones, when I could find them. Though dated, the older versions, seemed to be a little more realistic, and rougher and tougher than the sanitized 1960’s versions.

I was a big fan of the Tom Crobett Space Cadet series as well. I guess it was an early TV series, but I never saw that. I knew Tom Corbett only from the Carey Rockwell (with Willy Ley, Technical Advisor) books. I really liked the illustrations of those books. They had a lot of them, featuring rocketships like rocketships were meant to be! Plus plenty of illustrations of our heroes, the interiors of rocketships, and the planets – also as they were meant to be. They were great. I also have the Dig Allen, Space Explorer Adventures, by Joseph Greene, that I was less fond of. These were published by Golden Press who put out series books, that were sort of wanta-be rivals to those published by Grosset & Dunlap. They never quite measured up. Anyway, these books may also have formed my taste in speculative fiction – rocket ships, planets, and adventure. I never evolved beyond a good rousing adventure/romance. Mind-blowing what ifs and weirdness were never my cup of tea.

A few last thoughts. When I was reading the old Tom Swift books, the world they described at that time was only fifty years or so distant. Now they're more than a hundred years distant. The books I read fifty years ago, now don't seem all that old...

I see on Amazon, that someone has now tried to update the original Tom Swift Jr books. I don't know how well that would work, but I doubt that Tom Jr. keeps his "flat top" hair cut.