...a nod to Maxwell Grant, writer of "The Shadow"...

As Anaheim Public Library was one of my many haunts as a child, there were just as similar a series of books that I would return to many times.  Like you, there were those books that inspire or ignite your thoughts.  One of those books I only discovered because I was a young fan of "The Shadow" radio series.  Though I was not close to being alive at the time they came out, I had been an audiophile and come across many a tape with compilation sets.  For some reason it is the summer where I like to pull these out, turn off the lights, crack open the window for some of that Southern California air and just listen.

From there, as radio shows are scarce, the series of original pulp novels were readily available at the Book Baron, which used to be on Magnolia and Ball.  [Used book stores are a sign of the modern age.  Ideas and life's works can be bought and sold for pennies of their original value.  Hollywood has bred fashion and its disposal: books can be a form of third rate entertainment.  Now the stores are a dying breed.]  The shelves were once stocked, from floor to (almost) ceiling of the 1960s re-release of the Maxwell Grant novels.  For a dollar a pop, one could but feel the 'cheapness' of the original pulp novels that used to sell for a dime or a quarter.

From these books, I wanted to know more.  It was there I discovered among the entertainment shelves of the first floor of APL (when the adult section was on the first floor, and the entertainment was on the eastern side, about six rows from the windows, top-left), the book, The Shadow Scrapbook.  And it was written by Maxwell Grant, author of the bulk of Shadow novels.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1467916.The_Shadow_Scrapbook

From that book, you would learn that Maxwell Grant was the pseudonym of Walter B Gibson.  Not much a mystery, but this was pre-internet kids.  The amazing thing in all of this was that Gibson could write some million words a year.  He made a legitimate living out of writing from the time he was a youngster until his death in 1985.  The Scrapbook was more than a survey of Shadow memorabilia, it was also a biography of Gibson and his prodigious output.

If you could cull what little web articles exist, the highest output, for a year, was 1,680,000 words.  With Shadow, he would write 282 of the 325 produced.  It was definitely improbable to a 15-year-old reading the book to believe that Gibson had to deliver, in a year, something like 1,440,000 words, or 24 stories at 60,000 words a piece.  This output prompted the Corona Typewriter Company to use him in an ad campaign.

Herculean feat!

A tribute at http://www.mysticlightpress.com/index.php?page_id=131 calculates that, at the end of his career (although it appears he worked in some fashion until his death), that he had some 29,000,000 words total.  There would be a 125 non-Shadow titles.  If you go to the Amazon author page for Gibson, you will see 49 titles listed to this day.

Of course, my young mind reeled.  I believed I would be able to master the amount of words Mr. Gibson did, but even he admits that he was a bit on the obsessive side when it came to writing.  Now that I am much older than that boy in a dark library, my admiration has grown.  The feat may be beaten by technical writers or others, but the profound effect on the written word, by a shadow that still has a following today (some 80 years later) is astonishing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_B._Gibson

I'd imagine kids would stare at this image for hours, probably for more reasons than you think: television hadn't been invented yet!