Several months ago I was examining the lengthy list of Horatio Alger titles which are represented in the OCLC on-line catalog, a resource which now has 35 million titles, when I encountered a thoroughly unfamiliar title--The Platform School Dialogues, by Horatio Alger and O. Augusta Cheney. My first thought was that Alger's name might have appeared in one or more of the dialogues, and that someone long ago mistakenly credited Alger with title page status as the author.
There was only one approach to resolving the true nature of the publication, and that led to securing the item on interlibrary loan from the sole holding library in the nation. Fortunately, the item was in the library's general collection and was delivered to my home library within 10 days.
Receipt of the book immediately confirmed its authenticity as a new Alger title. It is a paperback book, published in 1895 by Henry J. Wehman of New York, as De Witt's School Dialogues No. 22. The book is 94 pages in length and contains 11 additional pages of advertisements. The book ads contain titles such as 'Skating and Games on the Ice," "Chemical Wonders for Home Exhibition," "Prescott's Standard Recitations" and "De Witt's American Chess Annual," a wide array of educational and how-to-do-it titles.
Experienced Alger collectors will recognize that O. Augusta Cheney was Horatio Alger's sister and his co-author of the 1875 A.K. Loring publication, Seeking His Fortune, a very rare title. The Platform School Dialogues reprints the first six dialogues that are found in the original Seeking His Fortune. These dialogues are "Seeking His Fortune", "One Week an Editor", "Keeping Genteel Boarders", "Mrs. Skinflint's Bargains", "Mrs. Grundy's Tyranny" and "Aunt Hannah's Valentine." Alger, in a slightly reworded preface than found in the original edition, indicates that only the first dialogue belonged to him, and that as far as the remainder are concerned, "...my part has been really that of an editor."
The six dialogues are printed directly from the original Loring plates. An inspection of the pages indicates the pagination and text positon are identical in this reprinting with the original publication. The Platform School Dialogues, in fact, represents the second reprinting of the Seeking His Fortune volume, the first reprinting being that issued by Ward & Drummond (New York, 1882). For the sake of bibliographic completeness, it should be noted that the first printing of the Seeking His Fortune dialogue by Alger appeared in Student and Schoolmate, March/ April 1866.
More research is warranted about the circumstances of publication, but we can say at this time that The Platform School Dialogues is a new Alger title and may be properly classified as an abbreviated reprint edition. One can speculate that since the first six dialogues were reprinted, perhaps the remaining 16 dialogues may have appeared in other Henry J. Wehman publications, or possibly issued by still another publisher. R.H. Russell, a New York publisher and the copyright owner of this title, might be a contender.
These dialogues by Alger and his sister seem to have enjoyed a more protracted readership than perhaps first believed with the issuance of the 1875 original and equally rare 1882 reprint.
The discovery of a new Alger title was both exciting and instructive--
exciting because every new title in an author's canon is a moment for
celebration, and instructive because we have learned, once again, that
the canon is rarely complete and that still another heretofore unknown
title and contribution may be out there awaiting its Diogenes.
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Reprinted from the March/April 1997 Newsboy