PDF Robin Hood and His Merry Men (Illustrated with Glossary) (Classic Books for Children Book 56)

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Selling Antique Books, Part II: Eight Ways to Determine Your Books’ Value

Thanks for your comment. I have a book in excelant condition titled Leaders of the 19th century. Would it have any value? I have a first edition of The phantom of the opera published by bobbs and Merrill , Trying to get a value of the book. I have a hard cover first edition book, The book is in good condition, can you please give by the value of what this book might be.

I would be interested to hear what, if anything, you have learned about it since you posted almost a year ago. Please submit photos and an auction evaluation form via our website: A or N Aforniohan W. No jacket but good shape. I have a leather bound set of The Marvelous Miniature Library. It contains 6 books: All are stamped Made in France. Published by Miniature Dictionary Publishers, Inc. Do you know when these may be been published? Would you have an approximate value of this collection? It would be below our minimum for auction. They are in excellent condition some slight yellowing on the hard cover but no tears inside or out.

No writting and no dogears. Can you give me an idea of their value. They have the paper covers but there is nothing written on the covers just a cut out so the volume number conveniently shows through the hole. They are in excellent condition. No torn pages, writting nor dogears. Thanks for your comments.

They are not something we would handle at auction. They are in good condition no paper covers and have been in a box in a closet for the last 50 years. Are they of interest in the antique book market? To find out what your Charles Dickens set may be worth at auction, please submit photos and an auction evaluation form on our website: Thank you for your response.

I have a good condition Les Miserables two volume set. They have gold covered top edges and have many page bottoms joined. No markings except for a large gift inscription on inside cover and facing page blank. Slightly marred title on the spine of Vol II. The absence of a book jacket that never existed does not affect the value of the book, so for books printed before book jackets were invented… this is a question that cannot be answered briefly. I have a edition of Hiawatha that appears to be covered with alligator skin.

It is in very good condition. What would the value be? Pamela, Thanks for commenting. Thanks for the great info. I believe this is the first American printing. The book is is in good condition with some wear at the top and bottom of the spine. Is this book of value on the antique book market? Dennis, Thank you for your comment. We are clearing out my mothers house. We found an Websters Dictionary in good condition.

Is this something we should sell at an estate sale or privately if it is valuable? We cannot find a way to approximate the value. I found a book at a used book store that I have been wondering about. The binding is battered and the pages are yellowed with age, but otherwise it is in good shape with a lovely marbled cover. Do you think that is a fair price? Please submit photos and an auction evaluation form on our website to find out what your autograph book may be worth at auction: I have also come into a large collection of mostly older books.

Thank you again for the information posted. Most of the books I suspect date between s to s. Are there any other tools out there that you could suggest that may help me separate the low-end books from the potential high end? Best of luck with the collection. I purchased a box of books at an auction and would like to know the value of one in particular. Brown Girl, Brownstones by Paule Marshall. Hi, My mom was given this book to her by a friend many years ago and she has had it tucked away.

She gave it to me as she is getting up in age and I was wondering if it is worth anything. Clemens above when my copy was printed and I would guess that would have been the 1st edtion. I have a book titled on outside Don Juan, it is intricately tooled leather, with two colors, black and brown. Cunningham , ESQ, , illustrations on steel, Philadelphia: It was given to my great uncle by a friend in as is inscribed.

Any information you could give me is appreciated, thank you for your time. I have a book by T. It has a preface by Harriet Beecher Stowe. It has a green cover with gold decoration. It has illustrations inside with tissue protective covering over each one. Gibbins titled Industry in England in very good condition.

Curious if anyone knows if any value as the book is really in incredible condition for its age aside from some penciled in notes from an obvious past student. Steve, Thanks for your comment. This book is not something we would handle at auction. Hardcover binding is worn on the edges and edges are starting to come apart. Any value , any interest? Merle, Thank you for your comment. I recently obtained 4 books and would like to obtain their values: What are Old Books Worth?

I have a 1st edition, 1st printing of grapes of wrath and a 1st edition, 1st printing of Sweet Thursday that is signed and inscribed. Please submit photos and an auction evaluation form on our website in order to find out what your books may be worth at auction: Thank you very much for the informative article and thanking you in advance for any advice you may offer. I was putting books away and found: Uncle Remus His Songs and Sayings.

Has gilt gold brer rabbit on brown cover. Ripped blank page but still present. Also…I found The Deerslayer. I only find a reference to this publishing in a Pittsburg Gazette ad in The condition of the paper seems quite old. Thank you, Adrian Stocks. To find out what these two books may be worth at auction, please submit photos and an auction evaluation form on our website: It is an A4 size book. I am wondering what this may be valued at? I have several books that I would appreciate your professional opinion on: Lippincott Company, First Edition 2. I have the two volume set of Dr.

I want to donate them to a local auction and was wondering what the value range might be. I have two books I am interesting in getting a value for. A few websites have ranged from dollars, and have left me a little in the dark of what to expect. It is in surprisingly good condition, with no tears or cracks, and only slight to moderate wear on the covers and binding. This edition is black, with the illustrated whale head breaching out of water on the cover, and the whale tail along the binding.

Neither book has a jacket, but I believe neither originally came with one. Neither has any writing in the book, or any tears or cracks. Thank you for your time! I recently came upon a first edition American imprint of Wharton, J. The Law Lexicon, or Dictionary of Jurisprudence. Not the Rothman reprint. Fisher Sydney George Fisher? The front cover is loose. Inside pages are tight with light foxing. To find out what your book may be worth at auction, please submit photos and an auction evaluation form on our website: It is leather bound, with five raised edges on the spine, gold gilt edges, and quite a bit of embossing on the covers.

Also, there are numerous engravings in the book, some with tissue between the pages. Any insight as to value that you could provide would be greatly appreciated. In tolerable condition, but needs some work. It was evidently supposed to be noteworthy due to its being Illustrated with engravings by by John Leach. Any insight to its value would be appreciated. I have a Pres.

Kennedy colorful White House book with personal message to my mother written on the cover and signed by J. My uncle Jerry Bruno was J. I also have the book Jerry Bruno wrote about Kennedy. I would like to know the value. Thank you, Rosemary Kishline. What is the current value of this book. Please submit photos and an auction evaluation form on our website to find out what your Darwin book may be worth at auction: I have a copy of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Book is ion good condition. From a school library. Bonzoi stamp on back. Thank you for a very informative site! To find out what your copy of Alice in Wonderland may be worth at auction, please submit photos and an auction evaluation form on our website: I have a copy of The Patent Hat. This copy is or seems to be particularly old. How can I find information and value of this book. I hope you can help me. Brian, To find out what your book may be worth at auction, please submit photos and an auction evaluation form on our website: I have a set of 11 books, Charles Dickens,appear to have been first issued in , but the preface is dated Are in good condition, but have a library stamp on the inside blank leaf.

Also a soft green leather edition with gold edging on pages of Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte,second edition December 21st, with a note to the 3rd edition dated April 13th Has a handwritten name, dated Also a library stamp. Is there any value to any of these books? Also an German book: Published in Philadelphia by Mentz and Roboudt.

Not sure if I have spelled everything right, the typeface is difficult to read. The cover had a lock which has deteriorated. Somehow my comment was deleted during a wait on reply. I hope you can tell me about an old book my Dad just acquired. Dear Christine, This book is not of high value and is not something we would offer at auction. You may be able to find out more about your book on a used book website: I have looked on a few websites for pricing on two old books but without any luck.

Paper page edges are gold color gilded. Any assistenace would be appreciated. Bone, who will find full particulars of himself in the dedication of this book! Thanks for the comment. I have beee trying to find information online about the pubplication date or possible worth of a book but I am unable to find any on the particular edition that I have.

It is a Blue cloth covered with numbered pages. Do you have any information about this book? This book is signed. Also has several samples of binding that can be obtained. Other illustrations have a small page insert describing the illustration.. I have never been able to find any info on this second book. Any help will be most appreciated. Your comment is awaiting moderation.

December 11, at 4: It was published in My copy is intact, no tears, and the only flaw is that the corner edges of the cover is slightly worn. I have no true idea of its worth nor do I know where it is best to sell it. I would appreciate your expert opinion. Hi my question is, I have the book, The Side of Paradise Fitzgerald, is without the dust cover but is on..

I have three books in my precence at this time, just curious if they may hold any value, they are: I am curious to know if this is a valuable book-all I can find on the Internet is about reprints in and so I am assuming this must be a worthwhile book to be still reprinting it. It is in pretty good condition apart from the back covering of the spine. Thanks for any info on the book! Hi John, Thanks for the comment. I have a few books that I am trying to find info on.

I do not see a date in 2 of them along with no copy right date. All have tissue paper over the illustrations. They appear to be leather bound. But it could be some faux material. They all have the same designs on the spine. They are burgondy in color. Thank You for your time.

Gary, Please fill out an auction evaluation form on our website: I think the book is from the late , so before WW II. Published in Germany and survived the huge bookburning sessions of the Nazis. Do you have any idea of what it would be worth? Tom, To find out what this book may be worth at auction, please submit photos of the title page and copyright page using the auction evaluation form on our website: I have book in a Czechoslovakian dialect with a printed date of yes !

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Robin Hood and His Merry Men (Illustrated with Glossary) (Classic Books for Children Book 56) - Kindle edition by Maude Redford Warren, Milo Winter. Results 1 - 30 of Robin Hood (Paperback) by Nick Rennison and a great selection of Published by Oldcastle Books Ltd, United Kingdom () Seller: The Book Depository Illustrated by author. ROBIN HOOD AND HIS MERRY MEN: Malcolm, Arthur .. Published by Doubleday Classics, Garden City ().

Also, collectors are interested in first editions of different Bible translations, and other landmarks in Bible scholarship. It was published by the John W. It is not thrown into oblivion after one hasty reading if it have true worth but is cherished, loved, reread, reprinted after its originator has passed to dust. Permanent as things may be upon this earth, it outlives the generations.

What more can an artistic soul require than that its dreams, its visions may go down the ages stirring in mankind to come pleasure, joy, hope, longing, aspiration, belief in the divine? So, in these years of readjustment following the worldwide conflagration; in these years of perplexity and strange, new ways of life; in this age of tragic poverty and of flaunting wealth; in these times when materialism all but throttles the breath of man while at the self-same moment airplanes, wireless, radio lift his spirit into the realms among the stars—the books of Howard Pyle live on.

Units indeed they are, for did he not create them in their entireties? Truly they will never die, fraught as only books can be with beauty—beauty of the eye and beauty of the spirit. Upon their pages rich in splendor, or at times with subtlety and intangible suggestion, at times again with unerring love and knowledge of historic periods and of characters, the pageantry of Howard Pyle's imagination passes before the reader's delighting eyes.

Here are castles, realms of fay, that rivet the beholder spellbound. Here are revelations, answers to the questionings of the soul. Here is glamour of romance-flaming sands, dark oceans, black-browed visages, galleons blazing in the sun. Here, too, is all the spirit of those times when under the exalted Washington our nation came to birth. Will not Howard Pyle's portrayal of Revolutionary days live as long as art endures? The works of Howard Pyle are unfailing inspiration to everyone who knows aught of illustration or of literature.

They gleam as guiding stars among the shadows of doubtful ways. I need not, I am sure, quote titles, but I must mention the delight that bubbles up inevitably within me whenever I stand before my shelves of writings and of drawings by him I so revered. Here throughout the years I have gathered a collection that could never be replaced. Here I find editions of every variation, both English and American. What joy to observe the slightest change in binding! And to handle these precious copies signed by H. This King Arthur is inscribed to me.

In all the world of books what volume can be found more rich in text and illustration? It seems but yesterday its author took it from me when I, still a student raw and young, stammeringly asked if he would sign it. Bending for an instant o'er his desk, he quickly sketched for me upon the waiting fly-leaf a head of fantasy that overflows with all that wealth of imagery so individually his own.

And here I have a box of H. Here is one, regal in color, stirring the heart in response to the adventure-"The Admiral came in his gig of state. As I gaze upon my treasures I seem to see their maker stand again before me as I looked upon him those many times, long gone now, down in his native Wilmington. How vividly I see those nights within the studio when perched before us on his stool H. The dome of his ample head shone in the yellow light. Shadows lay beneath his brows.

About his mouth there played those lines of earnestness and humor we had learned to love so well. For Howard Pyle was as absorbed in teaching as in all his other outlets of expression. Among the legacies he left the world none is more full of meaning than that group of workers which he sent forth into the illustration field.

To them he handed on his torch of truth. Theirs now it is to keep afire its flame. The s and s saw a renewed interest in the historical romance rivaling the great popular enthusiasm for the works of Sir Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper in the first half of the century. Canby, an astute observer of turn-of-the-century America, notes that this "new American school of the historical romance rose over night, blossomed like the desert in April, and withered at the first touch of twentieth-century realism," but not before these romances became such significant "determinants of inner life" for contemporary readers that no one unfamiliar with them "will ever understand the America of that day.

Mott, five of the ten best-sellers on the Bookman 's list were historical novels. Suddenly we became aware of a past—our own—that seemed as good as Scott's, and much like it. Into this floodtide of historical romance flowed a tributary stream of nineteenth-century "boy literature," the product of what Gillian Avery calls "the late Victorian vogue for manly boys," a literature of historical adventure dedicated to the formation of the mens sana in corpore sano , the boy with "pluck.

Ever a man of his time, Pyle launched a literary barque on the confluence of these two streams, producing historical adventure romances for adolescents, several involving knights and robber barons in medieval Europe and others involving pirates, planters, and merchants in colonial and early nineteenth-century America. Pyle's attitude toward adventure in these romances was essentially ambiguous: In his adventure romances, however, he could unite the hegira with the antithetical hearth, the Odyssean with the Telemachean impulses, by allowing his heroes to follow for a brief time the dangerous and irresponsible siren call to adventure before returning to the cozy domestic world of obligation and accountability.

Undoubtedly he thus recognized the essential function of the historical adventure novel as a safe way for the homebound into perilous and fascinating realms, a vicarious plunge into terror, risk, tension, and uncertainty without the loss of order, security, the familiar and predictable. Cawelti says of popular formula fiction in general, Pyle's adventure romances, especially his pirate tales, enable his audience "to explore in fantasy the boundary between the permitted and the forbidden and to experience in a carefully controlled way the possibility of stepping across this boundary," of indulging curiosity about actions feckless, unruly, or subversive "without endangering the cultural patterns that reject them.

In this chapter Otto of the Silver Hand and Men of Iron , both set in medieval Europe, receive primary consideration as the best of Pyle's historical adventures and the only ones that can claim a wide readership. They are both still in print, unlike the pirate romances discussed after them. The chapter concludes with a consideration of Pyle's only realist novel. One of the first historical novels written for children by an American, Otto of the Silver Hand is set in the Middle Ages at the pivotal point when Rudolph of Hapsburg forges a federation of lawless German barons into a viable empire, thus transforming chaos into order, barbarism into civil accord.

Eschewing the highly romanticized view of the Middle Ages then in vogue for a depiction closer to Twain's bleak but more precise vision in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court , Pyle attempts in Otto a realistic portrayal of the medieval period as "a great black gulf in human history, a gulf of ignorance, of superstition, of cruelty, and of wickedness. In the best tradition of the historical novel Pyle allows his readers to penetrate the intimate life of the thirteenth century, to "in-dwell" there through an unsparing presentation of the historical data—human actions, manners, customs, details of daily living, habits of thought and language—that enflesh that world, rendering it paradoxically both alien and familiar to readers fixed in the present.

In Otto of the Silver Hand , then, Pyle populates an accurately portrayed historical period with fictional characters and events to reflect the timeless opposition between good and evil, forgiveness and revenge, charitable reason and brutal coercion. The book is an influential one in the history of children's literature because, as Henry C. Pitz notes, it makes a "clean break" with the then "prevailing reluctance of writers to deal with brutality and evil in books for children," being published "at a time when, with only the fewest exceptions, children's authors timidly circled away from the bitterness of life or threw a veil over it.

Otto of the Silver Hand is a thematic tension of opposites, a dialectic between light and darkness, order and anarchy. Its plot is filled with rapid, often violent action, packed with the "brute incident" Robert Louis Stevenson saw as a crucial element in all successful adventure romance.

Raised by the gentle monks of St. Michaelsburg, twelve-year-old Otto is fetched home to the grim Castle Drachenhausen by his robber baron father, Conrad. After Baron Henry of Trutz-Drachen, ancestral foe of Otto's house, burns the castle in a raid and later severs Otto's right hand in retaliation for the murder of his kinsman by Otto's father, the two barons kill each other in a climactic purging of the old order of force and revenge.

Otto, made a ward of the enlightened Emperor Rudolph, unites peaceful monastic values with the emperor's code of order and civility, restoring the fortunes of his house and marrying the daughter of his erstwhile enemy, his severed right hand replaced by a silver one emblematic of a new reign of peace and justice. The polarity between civility and anarchy is clearly suggested in the novel's settings, the cold, dark robber Castles Drachenhausen and Trutz-Drachen contrasting with the Monastery of St.

Michaelsburg and the emperor's bustling town of Nurnburg, centers of peace and prosperity. Called by Baron Conrad himself "a vile, rough place" 33 , Castle Drachenhausen is surrounded by massive stone walls enclosing a bleak courtyard and "three great cheerless brick buildings, so forbidding that even the yellow sunlight could not light them into brightness" 4.

Within is a cacophony of harsh sound, "the clash of armor, the ring of iron-shod hoofs, or the hoarse cry to arms" The castle's watchtower, used to signal alarm and to summon the bandits to pillage, overlooks wild, impenetrable thickets and bare rocks where black swine feed "upon the refuse thrown out over the walls of the castle" The castle chapel is now used only as a charnel and the worm-eaten old books belonging to its last, unremembered chaplain have long ago been lugged up to a loft to repose "among the mouldering things of the past" This grim castle houses folk with "hard, rugged faces, seamed and weather-beaten" 59 and dominates "the wretched straw-thatched huts" and "vile hovels" of its dependent peasants, miserable serfs bound by chains of force and coercion to scratch out a meager subsistence while their wild, fierce children play "like foxes about their dens" The Monastery of St.

Michaelsburg, on the other hand, nestles on a gentle slope swept with vineyards and crowned with fruitful "field and garden and orchard. The monastery bell tower summons the community to prayer and overlooks placid, cultivated vistas. A haven for gentle and prosperous scholars, husbandmen, farmers, and vintners, the monastery treasures priceless illuminated manuscripts featuring pictures of angels caroling to poor peasants, awarding them precedence over kings in their worship of the Christ Child.

This pointed contrast between benighted castle and enlightened monastic community prepares for the eventual triumph of civility in Pyle's understanding of progressive medieval history.

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Michael patron of the monastery triumphs in the battle for Heaven over the dragon totem of Castle Drachenhausen , so the order and harmony fostered in the monastery and the emperor's court at Nurn-burg will vanquish the brutal, anarchic sway of the lawless robber barons by novel's end. These settings prepare the reader for the more significant contrast of deeds performed by the novel's central characters. Those associated with the monastery work toward a triumph over evil through suggestion and gentle persuasion, subtly, patiently in the face of numerous setbacks.

The denizens of the castles, on the other hand, breed violence from violence, enmeshing themselves in a dense web of disaster, its deadly pattern woven from repeated cycles of outrage and reprisal unforgiven through generations. Baron Conrad, for example, recites a lamentable history to Abbot Otto while vowing revenge against his enemies: This legacy of woe leads to Conrad's cold-blooded murder of Baron Frederick, which in turn leads to Baron Henry's destruction of Castle Drachenhausen and mutilation of little Otto.

The web of hatred and revenge grows so dense that at last both barons are enmeshed in it: Such revenge and bloodshed are, however, ultimately not as durable as mercy and forgiveness, which transform violence and hatred into their opposites. Throughout the novel Otto, the embodiment of gentle kindness, remains physically the weakest character in Pyle's cast. Small and frail as a child, his quiet reserve leads many to think he is mentally deficient. As an adult, too, Otto is "powerless," his silver hand preventing him from ever drawing a sword or striking a blow, a beneficent consequence of his mutilation.

Yet it is "weak" Otto who prevails over his stronger contemporaries by novel's end. Otto's influence for good is subtle but continuous, initiating the regeneration of his rough father and inducing One-Eyed Hans, his father's lieutenant, to spare a watchman during the rescue at Trutz-Drachen. Moreover, Otto ends the vicious cycles of retribution by begging Emperor Rudolph not to avenge him on the Trutz-Drachens but instead to allow him eventually to marry Pauline, daughter of his late enemy, the wisdom of which Rudolph concedes.

Otto's later position in the emperor's court is one of quiet mediation, his words "listened to and weighed by those who were high in Council, and even by the Emperor himself" Otto's new family motto—"A silver hand is better than an iron hand"—becomes the motto for the new age he helps the emperor to forge.

This image of the hand serves as a central unifying element in the novel, figuring, for example, in Brother John's vision of the Angel Gabriel whose hand, "as white as silver," grasps "a green bough with blossoms, like those that grow on the thorn bush" 45 , an obvious emblem for Otto's own silver hand from which peace flows to begin the transformation of his harsh, thorny world into a blossoming garden. Later, Baron Conrad's desire that Otto "shall live as his sires have lived before him, holding to his rights by the power and might of his right hand" 53 is ironically frustrated by Baron Henry, who tells Otto that with his severed hand he will never "be able to strike such a blow as thy father gave to Baron Frederick" This unifying image figures in several of the work's full-page illustrations as well, most notably in the prison scene at Trutz-Drachen where Otto instinctively cradles his right hand to his breast moments before Baron Henry severs it 93 and in the concluding illustration where Otto kisses, in reconciliation and love, the right hand of Pauline, daughter of his mutilator This repeated image further unifies a plot already adroit in its contrasting interplay of violence and peace, its careful building of suspense through delayed revelations of thematically significant incidents, and its remarkable clarity and richness.

Abbot Otto reading in his cell 29 , for example, is an incarnation of quietude: This stasis contrasts sharply with the following depiction of the wounding of Baron Conrad 35 , the picture plane teeming with embroiled horses and men, their lances and swords arching in the background to complete the energetic swirl of the design. Across this circular composition cuts the strong diagonal lance of Baron Frederick to pierce Baron Conrad, prone at lower right, a dramatic and wholly successful focus on the illustration's central import against a superbly orchestrated backdrop of chaotic struggle.

The following illustration marks a return to the quiet monastery 43 , Brother John, his strange eyes wide open to his marvelous visions, holding Otto to his breast, the infant lulled into slumber by the droning of the hived bees in the background. These countering forces meet in the illustration depicting Otto's departure from the monastery 57 , Brother John's simple, linear habit and innocent, open face at lower left contrasting with the convoluted figuration of the glinting chainmail worn by the scowling Baron and his men at upper right.

Appropriately centered in the picture, Otto is destined to bridge the gap between these antithetical forces: These full-page illustrations are complemented by a protocol of illuminated letters for each chapter, many with woodblock images from the danse macabre , and by tailpieces providing a central emblem for the chapters they close.

In addition, chapter headpieces vie in beauty and fullness of conception with the full-page illustrations, within their small, carefully designed spaces distilling the essence of the chapters they introduce. The headpiece for the table of contents, for example, depicts a clarion angel heralding with trumpet the advent of peace, a branch of olive held in his right hand.

The following headpiece for the foreword reveals the tenebrous nightmare world into which Otto is born, a world housing desperate peasants harried by the apocalyptic horsemen of unjust rule, war, and pestilence. Subsequent headpieces powerfully depict Death, hourglass in hand, tugging at the capes of the two barons before their fatal encounter , , and Emperor Rudolph seated in majesty, his right hand elevating a sword at which his nobles bow and his left hand dispensing a palm to a kneeling peasant Behind him the clarion angel reappears, holding aloft a scale of justice.

This headpiece summarizes the new order established at the conclusion of Otto of the Silver Hand , an order based essentially on the suppression of the "adventurer," that usually male character described by Paul Zweig as standing "outside the categories of duty and obligation," as occupying an "unsocialized space" where, "self-derived" and "self-determined," he follows his inner destiny regardless of the claims made on him by home or community. In the course of the novel the "adventurers," epitomized by the willful barons, are swept away, to be replaced by Zweig's "hero," incarnated in the Emperor Rudolph and in Otto himself, each of whom is an exemplar of right behavior, protecting his society's values and "sacrificing his personal needs for those of the community.

Otto 's lawless robber-barons, however, swept by the river out to sea, emerge in subsequent reincarnations, often on pirate ships, to challenge again the rule of law in Pyle's later adventure romances. A historical novel like Otto of the Silver Hand, Men of Iron provides an accurate reconstruction of castle life in Henry IV's fifteenth-century England and sets into this precisely drawn, unromanticized portrait of the late Middle Ages a full complement of fictional characters and episodes.

In Otto of the Silver Hand Pyle had been nearly as intent on chronicling the evolutionary progression in thirteenth-century Germany from lawless anarchy to social order as he was in delineating the fortunes of his main character. No such broad evolutionary social history informs Men of Iron. A bildungsroman, a more "private" history than that rendered in the earlier novel, Men of Iron features Myles Falworth's maturation to manhood, the channeling of his abundant energies toward socially constructive ends, and the eventual restoration of his family name and fortune through astute political maneuvering and Myles's skill at arms.

Roughly the first half of the novel, detailing Myles's childhood and youth, is modeled on Tom Brown's Schooldays , the best-seller by Thomas Hughes , responsible for a host of contemporary "school-book" imitations. The novel's second half, chronicling Myles's progression from insouciant adolescence to responsible manhood, is the quintessential adventure story, replete with battles, narrow escapes, and a love affair eventually consummated through marriage after numerous obstacles.

Through the four main parts of the story threads the measured unfolding of Myles's family history, the gradual revelation of injustice done, the identity of the perpetrator, and the righting of old wrongs. The novel opens with a brief historical introduction chronicling the ascent of Henry IV over the dethroned Edward II , "weak, wicked, and treacherous," and the subsequent plot against the new king that plummets many, including the innocent Falworths, into disfavor and ruin.

Mary's Priory, an oasis of peace similar to Otto's St. The second section of the novel, detailing Myles's advent at Devlen Castle and his initial weeks there, continues this close imitation of Tom Brown's Schooldays. A fifteenth-century ancestor of the Browns, whom Hughes describes as "a fighting family," the pugnacious Myles battles his Flashman, Walter Blunt, no less than three times over the issue of fagging.

Whereas Tom and his friend Scud East object, not to institutionally sanctioned fagging for the senior sixth-form boys, but to serving the fifth-form usurpers led by Flashman, the proud Myles objects to fagging in general, claiming that no shame "can be fouler than to do such menial service, saving for one's rightful Lord" The "war of independence" waged by Tom Brown, East, and their cohorts, restricted to a few bedroom pranks against the older boys and an eventual refereed fistfight with Flashman, pales to a mere skirmish beside the quite serious campaign waged by Myles's "Knights of the Rose" against the senior bachelors led by Blunt.

Myles doggedly pursues every opportunity to confront the enemy. In his first encounter with Blunt, the older boy nearly brains him with a thick wooden clog while the other bachelors hold him helpless on the floor. Myles's life is saved only by the timely intervention of Sir James Lee, supervisor of the castle squires. Myles's refusal to shake hands with Blunt soon leads to a second encounter where Myles is almost stabbed to death, though he manages, like Tom, to throw his enemy in a wrestling maneuver.

Learning that Blunt and his henchmen lie in wait to slit his ears, Myles, dodging lethal cobbles, musters his "Knights" into combat with wooden staves, having been dissuaded by the castle smith from using "knives with blades a foot long, pointed and double-edged" Finally, bleeding from the numerous injuries inflicted in a sword duel with Blunt, Myles manages to give his enemy a near-fatal head wound in a fight Pyle declines to detail, noting that combat "with a sharp-edged broadsword was not only brutal and debasing, but cruel and bloody as well" In going further in his delineation of conflict and violence than even Hughes himself, whose paean to pugilism in Tom Brown's Schooldays is famous, Pyle strives for historical accuracy, his unsentimentalized picture of the Middle Ages being in many instances a dark one.

A psychologically complex character, the sixteen-year-old Myles is presented in this section of the novel as an honorable, attractive, but hypersensitive youth governed by hot-headed pride, quick to take offense and to come to blows. Admittedly, his foe, Walter Blunt, is a dangerous adversary indeed, unlike Flashman, who is merely annoying and nasty. But Myles is simply too avid for battle, extreme at times in seeking its occasions.

This exaggerated pugnacity has its origins in Myles's natural propensity for action over debate as well as in his strong sense of alienation after learning from Sir James that his blind father is "an attainted outlaw" in great danger from a powerful foe whom Myles intemperately declares he would kill on the spot.

He also learns that the earl of Mackworth, in whose service he is enrolled, fears to come to his father's aid for political reasons. Thus Myles feels that he stands alone and must strike out at a host of enemies hedging him round. Sir James himself tells Myles that he can expect no open favor but must "live thine own life here and fight thine own way" In thus showing the inner workings of his hero's mind, Pyle manages to maintain reader sympathy with a character prone to pride and violence, examples of which abound, leading Francis Gascoyne, Myles's Scud East, to chide him for constantly breeding trouble for himself and for being so foolish as "to come hither to this place, and then not submit to the ways thereof, as the rest of us do" Myles's head is filled with dangerous romantic claptrap and nearly homicidal notions of honor, a mindset Pyle himself seems perilously close to admiring.

For example, after Blunt has ignominiously clobbered him with the clog, Myles screams, "I will have his life that struck me when I was down! At one point Myles uses as a pretext for conflict with the bachelors their beating of the lazy and exasperating Robin Ingoldsby, whose head Myles himself soon threatens to crack open with a block of wood. In short, though his resistance to tyranny is more often right than otherwise, Myles's bellicose behavior is unattractive, even if Sir James, "with a deal of dry gusto" , does describe to the delighted earl of Mackworth his multiple and near-fatal encounters as if they were mere boyish high jinks.

Though seeming at times troubled by Myles's bloody strategies for ending fagging, a "tyranny" eventually to become the time-honored rule in Britain's great public schools, Pyle nevertheless admires his hero for his "savage bull-dog tenacity" in winning his "first great fight in life" At this stage Myles manifests what Paul Zweig sees as a principal activity of the adventurer: On these visits Myles tells of the dangerous and alien world of his "boyish escapades" to girls who "hear little of such matters" until the earl puts a stop to the clandestine meetings.

When Myles's chivalrous letter to his "sworn lady," Alice, is subsequently intercepted, the earl makes him realize his selfishness in compromising the girl, telling him he is now "old enough to have some of the thoughts of a man, and to lay aside those of a boy" , advice later echoed by Sir James when he informs Myles of the earl's friendship and presents him with a war horse. The earl thus plays the same role of adult male intercessor in Myles's development that Dr. Arnold plays in Tom Brown's. By far the longest section of the novel is devoted to Myles's gradual transformation from adolescent to man, from adventurer to hero, a section filled with historical information about medieval knighthood and ceremony and resolving the tension threading throughout the work concerning Myles's adjustment of his family's position in the world and the identity of the family nemesis, the powerful earl of Alban.

After his knighting by the king whereupon he is proclaimed by all a reincarnation of Sir Galahad , his overcoming of the most renowned of the French champions in his maiden tilt, and a six-month stint in France with Lord George where his tested virtue emerges wholly triumphant , Myles returns to London for the final showdown with Alban.

A thoroughly conscienceless adventurer and thus the antithesis of the now-heroic Myles, Alban is the poisoned fount of all the Falworth troubles and the enemy of Mack-worth as well. His climactic encounter with the young hero is invested with near-cosmic overtones: Myles's boyish avidity for violence has been so tamed that both before and after the battle he agonizes with Prior Edward over the ethics of killing an enemy like Alban in fair fight, obviously a difficult question for Pyle too, conditioned as he was by Quaker pacifism.

Though the priest advises him that war and bloodshed, although cruel, are apparently placed in the world by God as an occasional means for bringing forth good from evil, Myles nevertheless spares Alban three times during their duel, a "false and foolish generosity," stemming from Myles's "impulsive youth" and his "romantic training in the artificial code of French chivalry" The unchivalrous Alban does not reward this generosity, however, riding over Myles repeatedly when he is down, as he had done in the earlier blinding of Myles's father, and severely wounding him before being slain by Myles with a mace, the weapon Alban had murdered Sir John Dale with in the opening pages of the novel.

Men of Iron culminates with the usual Pylean closure: Men of Iron thus supplies a model for maturation, much like those briefer ones Pyle would provide in the enfances of his Arthurian heroes. The novel assures its adolescent readers that if they have the necessary courage and pluck, they too, like Myles, can become "rich and happy and honored and beloved" after their "hard and noble fighting" They can, in short, carve for themselves comfortable niches in the precarious adult world where they can live fruitful and productive lives.

The black-and-white halftone illustrations further suggest this thematic progression toward maturity. The pictures for the first three-quarters of the volume focus on Myles's dependence, isolation, and vulnerability, while those in the latter part show him in his full manhood, capable and independent. The first illustration after the frontispiece 28 , for example, depicts Myles, small and alone in the foreground, kneeling to present his letter of petition to the powerful earl of Mackworth, who stands among his retainers. The illustration showing Myles held helpless on the ground, his head exposed to Blunt's murderous clog 70 , reinforces the isolation and vulnerability of his early days at Devlen Castle.

Other illustrations show him being called to account for his boyish actions by those older and wiser than himself , , and kneeling before King Henry to petition knighthood Nowhere in the later illustrations is the adult Myles thus presented as vulnerable or suppliant. Instead, he stands forth boldly as an adult in his armor to receive Lady Alice's favor , walks in a newly attained equality with Prior Edward, his family benefactor , and resolutely denounces the earl of Alban before the king himself Though thematically appropriate and often arrestingly composed and executed, the illustrations for Men of Iron do not share the imaginative pungency of Pyle's nimble pen-and-ink drawings, the reader's eye, according to Henry Pitz, traveling over these tipped-in gray halftone panels "without much temptation to linger and find long satisfactions.

Published just two years after Robin Hood, Within the Capes establishes the pattern for many of Pyle's later adventure stories in its portrayal of a quiet Quaker jarred out of his pacific existence to face often violent adventures before returning to a calm and prosperous family life. The romance begins and ends with its octogenarian narrator's reflections on the two years during which more happened to him "than happens to most men in a lifetime," his adventures being a relatively brief interruption in a long life thoroughly "even and uneventful, excepting as to such small things as occur in [a] quiet Quaker neighborhood.

The narrator, Tom Granger, recounts his adventures in the homely, artless, and digressive style appropriate for the ruminations of an old man. Hoping to preserve for posterity the story he has long been rehearsing orally, he writes to set the record straight, for he knows that things get so "monstrously twisted in passing from mouth to mouth" 2 that he fears being transformed over several generations into a posthumous pirate or murderer.

Curiously, he writes of himself in third person, almost as if the young man whose early adventures he records is quite other than the garrulous, kindly old man whose life as a paterfamilias and pillar of his community is now drawing to a close. The "he" of his narrative is thus himself as other, outsider, an alien whose voyaging-out has placed him beyond the boundaries of the closed and landlocked society that eventually reclaims him after his adventuring days are done.

This early alienation is a persistent theme in the novel. In the inland Quaker village of Eastcaster "little was known of the outside world" so that when Tom returns at novel's opening from a three-year cruise to the East Indies , he is looked upon "with a certain wariness, or shyness," his neighbors feeling "that he was not quite one of themselves" Elihu Penrose is thus hesitant for Tom to marry his daughter, preferring that Patty choose someone "content to grow green in the same place that our fathers grew green before us" When Tom returns a second time to Eastcaster after his later harrowing journey, he is thought to be "from foreign parts" , his long beard and graying hair so disguising him that even his closest friends fail to recognize him, believing him dead.

An Ancient Mariner, he returns to hold his audience—Doctor White, his family, various neighbors, the reader—spellbound with the tale of his travels in the countries of the marvelous. Like Paul Zweig's archaic adventurers and ecstatic shamans, Tom Granger returns from the borders of death itself to name the unnameable for auditors stuck in conventional domestic routines; he "pushes back the essential ignorance" in which his neighbors live by "exposing a further reach of darkness to the clarity of words. As with most adventure tales, Tom's is essentially formulaic. Such formulas, according to Cawelti, "are at once highly ordered and conventional" though "permeated with the symbols of danger, uncertainty, violence and sex," allowing a reader to share in these "ultimate excitements," but in such a way that the reader's "basic sense of security and order is intensified rather than disrupted.

Within the Capes is actually an amalgam of diverse popular genres, a conflation of the fictional formulas underlying the sentimental romance, the historical novel, the high seas adventure, the robinsonade, the buried treasure saga, the mystery and detective novel. The work of a young man, Within the Capes nevertheless evinces an authorial maturity in its careful pacing, controlled and unflagging action, appropriate narrative voice, and complete construction of setting and incident.

The novel is a tour de force, an artfully composed inventory of formulaic conventions.

Pyle, Howard 1853-1911

He discusses home schooling, catching rabbits, and collecting firewood in a homemade boat. By the time she was thirteen, Nancy knew she wanted to fly. In "Tom Chist and the Treasure-Box" Harper's Round Table , March , for example, Pyle makes his hero a foundling whose adventures culminate in the contrived but nevertheless satisfying revelation of his proper identity and high social position. Sharon, keep your hair on This is an illustrated, rhyming book with modern language and scenarios in which Sharon is marrying Jase and moving into his shed which is not quite big enough. The Adventures of Odysseus. Licence says the following:

In Within the Capes Pyle shows himself master of the many genres comprising the vast popular literature of the late nineteenth century. The romance is almost pure action, its exciting plot assuming primacy over theme and character motivation. In the first chapters Pyle draws on the conventions of the sentimental romance to tell of Tom Granger's springtime return to Eastcaster, his falling in love with Patty Penrose at Quaker meeting, and the exaggerated emotional ecstasies and upheavals he experiences as a young man in love. Lured by the high pay, he takes a berth against his conscience in a Quaker privateersman, the Nancy Hazlewood , fitted out in Philadelphia to intercept British shipping for plunder during the War of Here Pyle's interest in American history leads to an account of British harbor blockades, the inadequate state of the American navy, and the common practice on both sides of legalized piracy.

The blockade of the Delaware River temporarily lifted, the ship sets sail ten days before ready under a mysterious Captain Knight, who, it soon appears, is mentally unfit for his post, coming on deck wearing a broad red waistscarf bulging with a brace of pistols while the doomed ship is foundering in heavy seas. Modeled on the popular sea epics of Captain Marryat and others, this absorbing high seas adventure involves a near-collision with a British man-of-war which looms out of a fog bank, a storm that causes the ill-prepared ship to founder, an insane captain who refuses to lower lifeboats or signal a rescue ship, and Tom's ensuing mutiny before the loss of the vessel, its copper hull rising higher and higher in Tom's subsequent nightmares as it sinks at the stern.

Tom's archaic sense of honor remains intact through the crisis, Jack Baldwin, the first mate, having to tie him up and cast him into the lifeboat to prevent him from loyally perishing with the doomed crew.

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Pyle, Howard 1853-1911