Pollyanna Reprints

 

My best selling project at the moment is these reprints of the first several Pollyanna books. Each of mine is two of the original books in one volume. I published a paperback version of Pollyanna and Pollyanna Grows Up all the way back in 2016, when only the first two of the original Pollyanna books had entered the public domain--all the others were trapped on the opposite side of the copyright freeze. I was a little reluctant to reprint the next books anyway, since I knew they were written by a different author. I shouldn't have worried! Harriet Lummis Smith's books are every bit as charming as Eleanor H. Porter's. They were a bit harder to find than Eleanor H. Porter's books, though, so to get the original illustrations to add to my reprints I had to track down and buy early editions of the books. All but the earliest editions were printed with no illustrations.

Here's a picture of the original copies I bought of all four Harriet Lummis Smith Pollyanna books. It took some hunting to find ones that were both in good condition and in the price range I was willing to pay for them, as they are close to a hundred years old.

The second of these three reprints, Pollyanna of the Orange Blossoms and Pollyanna's Jewels, is currently the most popular. There are many more competing options available for Pollyanna and Pollyanna Grows Up; that's why mine tends to disappear into the "see all formats and editions" link on the Amazon listing. The third one, Pollyanna's Debt of Honor and Pollyanna's Western Adventure, was new this January because Pollyanna's Western Adventure, being published in 1929, only entered the public domain this year. I believe I am currently the only one who has reprinted it since it did become public domain, though there are of course still secondhand copies available from when it was newer. But I think people are buying the previous book before that one, which makes sense if they haven't already read it. 

In Pollyanna of the Orange Blossoms, Pollyanna is a bride and a newlywed, and in Pollyanna's Jewels, she is a young mother. That obviously makes these a little more mature in theme than the original two books, but not in a weird way. Pollyanna is still her sweet, sunny self--and still getting into trouble in entertaining ways. There's also plenty of drama with higher stakes, though usually it's not Pollyanna herself who is in any real danger. I enjoyed these books quite a lot, probably even more than the first two. 

The plot of Pollyanna's Debt of Honor centers on some friends and neighbors of Pollyanna's family, as Pollyanna herself is pretty much settled down by now. Pollyanna gets to do some matchmaking and other well-meaning interfering. But in Pollyanna's Western Adventure, the whole family is uprooted and sent on, well, a Western adventure. No one seems to remember that Pollyanna spent the first eleven years of her life in "a little Western town," which should have prevented too much culture shock when she goes back West as an adult. I suppose by this point she had lived longer back East, but eleven is old enough to get used to a place and remember it. So it's kind of weird when she makes a rookie mistake like leaving the door open when she just has to go outside and get a drink of water straight from the pump in the middle of the night.

Pollyanna and Pollyanna Grows Up was my second attempt at designing a book cover, and it was my first attempt at formatting a book over five hundred pages long, so it was a valuable practice project. I gave it a font change and new hardback version in late 2023, when I was getting ready to publish the next book in early 2024, but since I had saved all my files from 2016 I could make the books match without having to do a complete redesign. One could argue that I went a bit overboard on the flowers and rainbows, but if you can't go overboard with flowers and rainbows for Pollyanna, when can you?