Trawling Through The Thrift Stores with Joseph Finn

 Happy Thursday, everyone!  I'm mixing it up a bit this week and focusing on one item in more depth.  Please, join me as we go to the world of tomorrow: 1954!

Originally created in 1910 by the Stratemeyer Syndicate, the publishing company that also oversaw series like The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, like them this was a series written by a succession of ghostwriters, all of them using the house pseudonym of Victor Appleton.  That first series had Tom Swift, a young man who was more of a tinkerer than an inventor and his light-hearted adventures.  Very popular, it ran from 1910 to 1941.  As you can probably guess from the cover about, this is from the second series, which started in 1954 and starred Tom's son, Tom Swift Jr, and took much more of a science fiction bent.   Now the adventures are more whacky and involve fantastical inventions and adventures.

Seriously, check out those titles.   These are the product of a syndicate with a deranged mind

The internal illustrations for the novel are by one J. Graham Kaye, who I can't find a ton of information about but appears to be one of those mid-century illustrators who did a bit of everything and a lot of magazine work.  (His name pops up a bunch in regards to Saturday Evening Post.  I like his style; it's fun and crisp and it just slightly goofy enough for these science-fiction shenanigans.  These are Tom Swift his buddies diving suits, which I simply love the weird egg look of them.  (I was curious as to how close in time SCUBA had been developed, and turns out the Costeau Aqua-Lung had been developed just a decade before and SCUBA was created only in 1952; people were still using the standard diving suit for deeper underwater work, like the one below.)

This particular volume is written by John Almquist, who was a prolific writer for the Stratemeyer Syndicate.   He wrote a lot of this second series of Tom Swift and also a bunch of the Hardy Boy books that were attributed to Frank W. Dixon.  Like many authors employed by the Syndicate, there's simply not that much information floating around about him.  But if you have any interest in the subject of how this system of pseudonyms worked, I cannot recommend enough the excellent book Girl Sleuth, which is primarily about Mildred Wirt Benson, an Iowa author and pilot who wrote the vast majority of Nancy Drew and finally got the credit for it after she got sick of Harriet Stratemeyer Adams claiming that she wrote all of them under the pseudonym Carolyn Keene.

Finally, you might have asked yourself, "What the hell is a jetmarine?"  Well, it's essentially just a submarine that uses jets of water to propel itself, not a completely ludicrous suggestion (the window is dumb as hell though and would completely useless underwater).  It's nuclear-powered, which was still as cutting-edge as hell (the first nuclear submarine, the USS Nautilus, had just been launched in January 1954).  Fun fact: six US Presidents have served in the Navy, but only one was a submariner: Jimmy Carter, who ended up working under Admiral Rickover on the construction of the Nautilus before he resigned to take over the family business after his father died.