I would like to read some of the Frank Reade & Frank Reade, Jr. proto-SF-adventure stories (Edisonades, as they now are called) from the 19th Century. I can find none in my local library. All must be long out of copyright but gutenberg.org doesn’t have them. My google-fu turns up nothing. Any suggestions?
The Edisonades, BTW, are the inspiration (more or less) for modern Steampunk.
For a good Edisonade parody, see Into the Aether, by Richard A. Lupoff.
You’re in Tampa, right? The University of South Florida-Tampa library has a dime novel collection that has a lot of Luis Senarens’ “Frank Reade, Jr.” books. See here:
If you can get access to their library, that might help.
Thanx, I’ll try. Funny thing, I could never find any Frank Reade novels in the library catalog when I was a grad student there not so long ago. They must be in Special Collections (non-circulating).
Googling ‘Frank Reade Library’ (without quotes) turns up the following PDFs Frank Reade 19, Frank Reade 15, and this site has a page which talks about Reade and has a PDF of a novel from the era written along the same lines as Reade.