Motorcycle Adventure Book Archive Showing Early Fictional Uses of Motor Travel, Scouting, and Wartime Dispatch Riding, 1910 to 1918

Early Motorcycle Subculture

Archive

Motorcycle adventure book archive, 1910 to 1918, gathers three early twentieth-century juvenile novels that used the motorcycle as a symbol of speed, independence, mechanical ingenuity, and modern mobility. The grouping belongs to American youth literature and transportation culture, illustrating how boys’ series fiction translated new motor technologies into stories of exploration, problem-solving, scouting, and wartime service. Rather than documenting motorcycling as a subculture in the later sense, the books show how motorcycles entered popular fiction as instruments of movement across towns, roads, camps, and military landscapes, giving young readers a narrative form for imagining modern travel, outdoor self-reliance, and technological competence.
The archive consists of three hardcover books published between 1910 and 1918, each approximately 200 pages and measuring about 5.25 x 7.75 inches. The books include illustrations and maps throughout, with one volume containing photographs on the pastedowns and two volumes including photographs on the publishing page. Collectively, the archive documents the early literary treatment of motorcycling across three overlapping contexts: invention fiction, Boy Scout adventure, and World War I messenger service. The physical group also preserves the publishers’ commercial presentation of motorcycle adventure through illustrated covers, series formats, and pictorial apparatus designed for young readers.

[1] Appleton, Victor. Tom Swift and His Motor Cycle. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1910. First edition hardcover with dust jacket. Early Tom Swift adventure using the motorcycle as an emblem of mechanical modernity and youthful mobility, placing motor travel within the broader culture of invention, speed, and technical problem solving associated with the series. [2] Ralphson, G. Harvey. Boy Scouts on Motorcycles or With the Flying Squadron. Chicago: M. A. Donohue & Company, 1912. First edition hardcover. Juvenile scouting adventure that links motorcycles to organized boys’ outdoor culture, group travel, and the expanding possibilities of overland movement before the automobile had fully displaced other forms of motorized road travel. [3] Fitzhugh, Percy Keese. Tom Slade Motor Cycle Dispatch Bearer. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1918. First edition hardcover. Wartime juvenile novel placing the motorcycle within the military role of dispatch carrying, connecting boys’ adventure fiction to World War I service, communications, and patriotic mobility. Covers clean and textblocks tight, with slight age wear to spines and edges; Boy Scouts on Motorcycles has front cover and front free endpaper separated from the spine but still attached by the binding; overall very good. Cohesive archive showing how early American juvenile fiction made the motorcycle a vehicle for modern youth, national movement, and technological imagination.

Item #20179

Price: $455.00