| The Journal of Provincial Thought |
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A vast series of improbable romances featuring a boy genius who invents his way out of any dilemma or problem, using all the gee-whiz technology of ca. 1905. For example, Tomz Whiffer and His Electric Jock-Strap, Tomz Whiffer and His Electric Fountain Pen, Tomz Whiffer Defeats the Yellow Peril with His Electric Kazoo, etc. Obsessive focus on minutiae of gears, cams, electric capacitance, chemical bonding and other bafflegab.
Severely girlie mysteries solved by teenaged sleuthette through intuition, gossip, backstairs malice, petty blackmail and other tried and tested feminine wiles. Always features protracted and highly detailed scenes of near-rape, fondling and titillating passages on pubescent underwear, kiltie dresses, black lisle stockings and other yummy visions for old-fart readers. Sample titles from the first 60 years or so of publication: Nancy Drawd and the Enigma of the Gin Mill, Nancy Drawd, Girl Sobriquette, Nancy Drawd and the Peace of Versailles, Nancy Drawd Goes to Helligan.
Comic vision of the American Midwest in the years before anyone could escape to the coasts, featuring the Blofeld family and its smile-inducing but very mild adventures with foodstuffs, carpet cleaning, neighborhood zoning problems and other impedimenta to clear thinking. Teenage Benrod discovers the joys of smoking cornsilk, tormenting ethnic peasant immigrants, attending rites of passage like fraternity hazings, smalltime lynchings and random acts of assault and battery. Best-known volumes: Sixteen and Three-Quarters, Benrod and Bud, Benrod’s Bizzy Daze.
Like Nancy Drawd but for younger readers, written in international babytalk and loaded with cloying illustrations in a sickening debasement of art nouveau. Little Ima is the apple of her parents’ eyes and a pain in the ass to the rest of the inhabited galaxy. She speaks in Sunday School epithets with a pronounced lisp and wears a teeny dress that shows her flouncy drawers to any passing pervert. Some titles from the infinitely long series: Ima Meets Doktor Doonothing, Ima at the Masquerade of the Red Death, Ima and the Moebius Strip, Ima Goes to
A pair of obnoxious brothers (Eric, 10, and Deric, 14) rush around the globe nosing into other peoples’ private lives and solving cases too trivial even for Neighborhood Watch. The boys are sons of Judge Nevin Hardly, a failed lower court magistrate who dreams of being a Papal Legate. Some titles still available from used and remainders bookstores: The Hardly Boys Go to Srbenika, The Hardly Boys in Mortal Peril, The Hardly Boys Eat Kalimari and Live! The Hardly Boys Read Old Books.
Boisterous yarns about a Typical College Man in the days of President McKinley who is forced to go through freshman hazing wearing a teenie beanie and singing the Whiffenproof Song to any passing dolt but who becomes an All-American Football Hero and helps the wimpy HBS gridiron 11 massacre arch-rival Vassar Women’s Presbyterian Seminary in the annual Terlette Bowl: Fight fiercely, Harvard, do! Best-known volumes: Dink Slover and the Leveraged Buyout, Dink Slover Sells Short and Dink Slover, CPA.
Teenaged girlies twice as obnoxious as Nancy Drawd who exert fatal fascination for orientals, Turks, Abyssinians and other exotic kinds of child-molesters and who are often drawn into international plots involving dreadnoughts, zeppelins, armored trains, electric torpedoes and other long-extinct militaria. The 15-year-old twins are distinctly different—Arbella is much more awful than
| jptArchive Issue 6 |
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