June 19, 2025 and on this day 109 years ago in 1916, Edgar Rice Burroughs bought a new ¾ ton Republic Truck in South Bend, Indiana to carry luggage on the family’s cross-country trip. Ed wrote a brochure about the journey for the Republic Motor Truck Company which used it as an advertising giveaway.
In December 1916, W.A. Somerville, the advertising manager for the Republic Motor Truck Company, wrote to ERB asking him to write "a little book, detailing your experiences with your Republic truck on your recent transcontinental journey." Somerville also told ERB that the booklet would be distributed free and would have a circulation of approximately 250,000 copies. It is not known how many were actually published or distributed.
The original was probably published in 1917. It was bound in brown suede with brown satin end papers and instead of being stapled, was held together with a small cord in a bow knot. The interior line drawings were originally sepia toned. There are several interior illustrations, but I haven't identified the artist.
The Burroughs Bibliophiles published a facsimile edition in 1996.
The entire booklet may be read at: https://www.erbzine.com/mag0/0030.html
The drabble for today, “Heavy Load”, was written by Edgar Rice Burroughs. It is an excerpted from “An Autobiography.” Notice that Ed poked a little fun at himself.
There was an enormous refrigerator, an oil cook stove, a fireless cooker, a hat box, galvanized iron tanks, a phonograph, folding cots, stools, tables, a bath tub, two trunks, countless suit cases and bags, seven rolls of bedding, toys, flag, tent poles and stakes, a great tent, and goodness knows what all beside. They were buying me to carry this junk to the Atlantic Ocean. If it had been mine, I wouldn't have packed it all that distance, but then, as I learned later, The Boss is one of these writer fellows, for whose mental functionings, there is no accounting.
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