"The Sky Pirate", by Garrett P. Serviss

[oldskoolpunk]

Here's a steampunk era novel which was never published as a book, and was originally published as a serial in newspapers in 1911 - "The Sky Pirate", by Garrett P. Serviss. He also wrote "Edison's Conquest of Mars", which is better known.

This is so old that it's out of copyright. So if we can put all the parts together, we'll have a nice read. It could be submitted to Project Gutenberg or Amazon Print-on-Demand. It was published, one chapter per day, in the Gettysburg Times, which Google has scanned. I'm filling in the links here as I find the right spots. It's on page 3 of each issue.

Prologue / Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VIII  Where's chapter VII?  Chapter VI was in  the issue of 1911-07-27, and chapter VIII is in the issue of 1911-07-28.  

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter XI

Chapter XII

Chapter XIII

Chapter XV Chapter XIV is missing; XIII was printed on 1911-08-03, and XV appeared on 1911-08-04.

Chapter XVI

Chapter XVII

Chapter XVIII

Chapter XIX

Chapter XX The End.

That's the story, minus two chapters the Gettysburg Times somehow lost. Somewhere, probably on microfilms of newspapers from July and August 2011, are the missing two chapters. Anyone handy to a big microfilmed newspaper collection?

[oldskoolpunk]

Found the missing Chapter VI and Chapter XIV in the Library of Congress's collection of the El Paso Herald. More readable than Google's scan, and there's an OCR version that will need a lot of work.

[oldskoolpunk]

PROLOGUE.

The sea pirate has long been a fascinating figure of romance, but the march of progress has driven him into well deserved retirement, and he has now been replaced, in fiction at least, by the sky pirate, who is even more mysterious, more daring and more romantic than his predecessor. Read and there will unfold before you the extraordinary story of Captain Alfonso Payton and his airship, the Chameleon; of William Grayman, the richest man in the world; of his beautiful daughter, for whose ransom $10,000,000 was demanded; of Lieutenant Allen of the revenue service, of wonders by wireless and of fierce battles above the clouds.

[CPT_J_Percell]

That would take alot of work to write up as I am unable to recognise some of the words!

[oldskoolpunk]

I've found good scans of all the installments from the Library of Congress, and I'm slowly cleaning up the OCR output. Chapters 1 and 2 are done. When it's done, I'll post it to Project Gutenberg. Anyone interested in helping? Please let me know.

The first installment, in the El Paso Herald. Contains Chapter 1, and part of Chapter 2.

[pakled]

Well, you've probably already visited this site, but the is a search for Garrett Serviss. There's a link on this site (6 million books. There's a lot of serialized magazines like Galaxy andg, Astounding, so it's a good start. Already looked at Gutenberg, Digilibraries, and Mobileread, but...bupkis. Good luck, you can never have too many books.

https://archive.org/details/texts?and[]=garrett%20serviss

[oldskoolpunk]

Plugging along; chapters 1-4 converted.