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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 9454103" data-attributes="member: 8461">I just polished off an old copy of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Hahn" target="_blank">Emily Hahn</a>'s 1959 book, Around the World with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nellie_Bly" target="_blank">Nellie Bly</a>, that I picked up a short while ago.I'll admit that seeing this book for sale got a laugh out of me, as I'd just read an essay about an old Nelly Bly boardgame a <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/what-are-you-reading-in-2024.701874/post-9399221" target="_blank">few weeks ago</a>. It wasn't the first time I'd heard about her (that was from the episode of The West Wing mentioned on her Wikipedia page), but the coincidence was too delightful for me not to purchase this title.I mentioned that The Lives of the Necromancers took longer than expected because the book's pages were larger than I'd thought, and with a smaller font than expected. This book, by contrast, was exactly the opposite. While not quite what we'd think of as "mass market" size today, this is still a relatively modest book. More than that, the font was slight larger than I'd anticipated, and with a bit more space between each line as well. It almost reminded me of a children's book in its interior layout, with the illustrations (by B. Holmes, about whom I could find nothing) in particular reminding me of the old books I read as a kid.As for the book itself, while it could be called a biography, covering the early parts of Nellie's life and career in some detail (and only a tiny bit of what she did afterward), the majority of its text is dedicated to her titular trip around the world, which was done in an attempt to beat Jules Verne's fictitious Phileas Fogg from Around the World in Eighty Days. As Hahn points out, what made this particularly notable (which was good for Nellie's newspaper, since the entire thing was a publicity stunt) was that it was being done by a young woman traveling completely alone, something which shocked people, but also delighted them, as she returned to parades, chorus songs, and lasting celebrity (on top of her previous journalistic exposés), not to mention a great deal of money.That said, even if I hadn't known that this book was written in 1959, the writing would have given away that it was from different era. Leaving aside the use of the ocassional term that no one would use now (e.g. referring to American money as "greenbacks"), quite a few of the comparisons between Nellie's time and "today" felt amusingly dated (though a few felt timeless, such as when the author notes how today, if there isn't any news that's headline-worthy, the editors will just make something up).On a minor note, there's a slight error in the numbering of the chapters, as Chapter 6 is mistakenly presented as being Chapter 9. The pagination is correct, and the narrative is unbroken; it's more like someone somehow turned the printing plate upside-down. I was also mildly surprised to find that, while there was no table of contents, the book had an index of all the topics mentioned over the course of Nellie's journey.</blockquote>

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