Preview · Page 1 of 3
Meet the Book
This is the book's own stage: J. A. Dacus stands and reads his history aloud — the first 72 seconds of Chapter One, Chapter I — The James Family, over the book's 36-second stage loop, played twice, with the book's own 1880 engravings behind him. The barcode rides every frame — scan any moment to come back to this bookstore.
“The Rev.”
That is how the history begins — with the father, a Kentucky preacher. Press Next to step into the middle of the book, where the robbing is already underway.
Preview · Page 2 of 3
From the Middle — Chapter XII — The Russellville Bank Robbery
J. A. DACUS
Russellville, Kentucky, on a bright March morning in 1868 — everybody minding their own affairs, and then: “People were simply minding their affairs according to their own inclinations. There was a sudden clatter of hoofs that morning, the 20th of March, 1868. Terrible shouts and fearful oaths, and the sharp reports of pistols accompanied the sound of the horses' hoofs.” A dozen horsemen, two pairs of revolvers each, and the bank's safe emptied in minutes. Dacus tells it as it was told to him, in his own words, exactly as his 1880 history gives them.
Press Next to see everything that is inside the whole book.
Preview · Page 3 of 3
What’s Inside
- Chapters I–XXIV, complete: 33,073 words, Dacus's own text exactly as he wrote it — the James family and the boys' childhood, Frank with Quantrell's guerrillas and the sack of Lawrence, Kansas, then the outlaw years: the Liberty, Russellville, Gallatin, Columbia and Corydon bank robberies, Ste. Genevieve, the Iowa train robbery, the Gains' Place stage robbery, and the train robbery at Gadshill.
- 3 hours 25 minutes of narration — J. A. Dacus himself stands on the stage and reads his own history aloud, chapter by chapter, in a reading room you can follow with your eyes.
- The plates — the book's own 1880 engravings: Frank and Jesse James, engraved from photographs (the frontispiece), Quantrell's Last Fight, and Fight in a Gambler's Den.
- Written while Jesse James still lived: Dacus published this history at St. Louis in 1880, and its last chapter tells how Jesse still rode free in January of that year. What he set down is what the record and the reports of the day gave him — nothing added, nothing taken away.
- The barcode rides every stage frame — scan any moment to come back to this bookstore.
This is the public-domain text of J. A. Dacus's Life and Adventures of Frank and Jesse James (St. Louis, 1880; Project Gutenberg transcription #45660), presented as a talking hologram book, with all modern editorial matter removed and Dacus's spelling untouched. The narration is a performed reading of that public-domain text, made for this edition. No portrait of Dacus painted from life is known to survive — the narrator on the stage is an artist's rendering presented in his name, and the book says so plainly in its disclaimer, which stands first, before the book begins. Editor: Franklin Langston.
$79
franklinlangston.gumroad.com/l/irdakm
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