Frederick D. Ellsworth – författare

A New York man is delivered a mysterious carpet, wishes himself away on it, and wakes on a Mars of decayed cities, listless golden people who have forgotten everything, and a princess drawn away by the river of the dead. Arnold published this in 1905, seven years before Burroughs sent John Carter to Barsoom; it sold badly, he never wrote another, and readers have been arguing about what Burroughs owed him ever since.

Billy is engaged to Bertram, and everyone in both families has an opinion - while a composer, a sister-in-law and a very great deal of Boston propriety take a hand. Porter trained as a singer in Boston before turning to fiction and in 1913 gave the language a word, Pollyanna; the Billy books are her comedy of a household of bachelors invaded by a girl, and this is the one where the machinery pays off.

Quatermain at eighteen, in love with a Boer girl whose father will not have an Englishman, caught in the siege of a mission station and then in the Great Trek - and at Retief's massacre by Dingaan, which he watched from a hill. Haggard went to South Africa at nineteen and helped raise the Union Jack over the Transvaal; here he wrote the Trek from Boer and Zulu testimony collected while the survivors were alive, and Marie is the first of the Quatermain books chronologically.

A Japanese prince, the most charming man in London, is at the center of an affair in which two men die and an alliance hangs - and Inspector Jacks knows perfectly well who did it and can prove nothing. Oppenheim worked in his father's leather business for twenty years while writing at night, then produced some hundred and fifteen novels; this 1910 book is unusual for its date in that the prince is the most honorable person in it.

A head waiter finds a guest's abandoned luggage stuffed with manuscripts and, after seven years, sells them to a publisher - which is Dickens's excuse for a set of stories, including His Boots, one of the best things he wrote about a child. Sent at twelve to work in a blacking factory while his father sat in a debtors' prison, Dickens made these Christmas numbers of All the Year Round with a stable of contributors, and this one is the funniest.

Paris, 1794: the Pimpernel goes back into the city to bring out the Dauphin from the Temple prison, and Chauvelin has learned enough to bait a trap with the one thing Blakeney cannot refuse. Orczy wrote sixteen of these; this is the one where the mask comes off and the man underneath is broken on purpose.