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| Illustration by Harrison Cady of Story 664. "Old Mr. Toad's Mistake." |
I've just uploaded the third volume of the Complete Little Stories for Bedtime by Thornton W. Burgess. This one compiles his newspaper stories, #591 to #902, from 1914. This was the year of the first Bedtime Stories Clubs (exhaustively documented) and the year that Farmer Brown's boy became the friend of the folks of the Green Meadows and Green Forest. Here is an opportunity to read these stories in their original continuity. Note that there are plans for a fourth volume but my work will shift to audio for the near future.
I've been recording myself reading some of Burgess's stories, beginning with the first published story featuring his Green Meadows/Forest characters, "How Reddy Fox was Surprised," which appeared in Good Housekeeping, April 1910, and is most famous as either chapter 3 or 4 of Old Mother West Wind, depending on the edition. As an experiment, I mixed together a mash-up of my own reading together with nine other recorded readings of the story, with some interesting results. I was surprised, for example, at the number of moments when line readings, recorded completely independently, synced almost perfectly together. I've uploaded the mash-up for anyone who is interested, though the overall effect is of an comically under-rehearsed group reading performance.
