The timing was right, but the Los Angeles Public Library did not have anything by Thornton W. Burgess when I was a child. He was an author that I heard about but never read. The LAPL had a very rigid policy for "literature" but against "popular mass series" during my childhood. No Oz books; nothing by Edgar Rice Burroughs, no Thornton Burgess. No Palmer Cox, no Hardy Boys, no Nancy Drew. One of the first things that I did when I became a student at UCLA in 1958 and got access to the UCLA Research Library was to read everything by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Then UCLA's set of bound issues of Astounding Science Fiction going back to the earliest Street & Smith issues in 1933. I later realized that even if the Roosevelt Bears books had still been available in the 1940s, the LAPL would never have gotten them because they "were not literature; they were just mass-market series books".
The timing was right, but the Los Angeles Public Library did not have anything by Thornton W. Burgess when I was a child. He was an author that I heard about but never read. The LAPL had a very rigid policy for "literature" but against "popular mass series" during my childhood. No Oz books; nothing by Edgar Rice Burroughs, no Thornton Burgess. No Palmer Cox, no Hardy Boys, no Nancy Drew. One of the first things that I did when I became a student at UCLA in 1958 and got access to the UCLA Research Library was to read everything by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Then UCLA's set of bound issues of Astounding Science Fiction going back to the earliest Street & Smith issues in 1933. I later realized that even if the Roosevelt Bears books had still been available in the 1940s, the LAPL would never have gotten them because they "were not literature; they were just mass-market series books".
Fred Patten