Every Boy's Library: The Original Boy Scout Book List

In 1912, the Boy Scouts of America decided that reading was a scouting skill.

The organization was two years old and growing fast, and its Chief Scout Librarian, Franklin K. Mathews, had a strong opinion about what boys were reading. The dime novels of the day were, in his view, cheap thrills that wasted a boy’s imagination. His answer wasn’t to ban anything. It was to compete. The BSA partnered with the publisher Grosset & Dunlap to select and reprint the books it believed every American boy should own, stamped with the official Scout emblem and priced so a boy could buy them with his own money.

The result was Every Boy’s Library, Boy Scouts of America Edition: 73 titles spanning sea stories, frontier history, school sports, and the great classics. It amounts to an official reading list from the founding generation of American scouting, and it holds up remarkably well.

Why These Books Are Free

Every underlying work in the series was originally published before 1931, which places all of them in the United States public domain. The reprint series itself ran from 1912 into the mid-1930s, but copyright follows the original publication, not the reprint. We are attaching a free, legal link to each title as we verify its best available edition, starting with the classics below, all confirmed and linked on Project Gutenberg. Titles not yet linked are next in the queue.

The List

We are recovering the complete 73-title list from collector records and the printed lists inside surviving volumes. Fifty-five titles are confirmed so far. The rest will be added as they’re verified, and if you own an Every Boy’s Library volume with the full list printed in the back, we would genuinely love a photograph of it.

The Classics

The backbone of the list. Mathews put the canon in Scout uniform.

• Treasure Island — Robert Louis Stevenson · Read free
• Kidnapped — Robert Louis Stevenson · Read free
• The Call of the Wild — Jack London · Read free
• The Cruise of the Dazzler — Jack London · Read free
• Brown Wolf and Other Jack London Stories — Jack London · Read free
• The Last of the Mohicans — James Fenimore Cooper · Read free
• Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea — Jules Verne · Read free
• Ben-Hur — Lew Wallace · Read free
• The Ransom of Red Chief and Other O. Henry Stories — O. Henry · Read the title story free in its original collection, Whirligigs
• Animal Heroes — Ernest Thompson Seton · Read free
• The Cruise of the Cachalot — Frank T. Bullen · Read free
• The Last of the Plainsmen — Zane Grey · Read free

Scouting Originals

Books written for and about the Scouts themselves, including a history series illustrated by a young Norman Rockwell.

• The Official Handbook for Boys — Boy Scouts of America
• Along the Mohawk Trail — Percy Keese Fitzhugh
• The Boy Scouts of Bob’s Hill — Charles Pierce Burton
• The Boy Scouts of Black Eagle Patrol — Leslie W. Quirk
• Don Strong of the Wolf Patrol — William Heyliger
• Don Strong, Patrol Leader — William Heyliger
• Under Boy Scout Colors — Joseph B. Ames
• Be Prepared: The Boy Scouts in Florida — A. W. Dimock
• Scouting with Daniel Boone — Everett T. Tomlinson, illustrated by Norman Rockwell
• Scouting with Kit Carson — Everett T. Tomlinson
• Scouting with General Funston — Everett T. Tomlinson

Frontier, Sea, and Field

• The Horsemen of the Plains — Joseph A. Altsheler
• The Wolf Hunters — George Bird Grinnell
• Lone Bull’s Mistake — James Willard Schultz
• The Quest of the Fish-Dog Skin — James Willard Schultz
• Ungava Bob — Dillon Wallace
• Billy Topsail, M.D. — Norman Duncan
• Wells Brothers — Andy Adams
• Pete, Cow-Puncher — Joseph B. Ames
• The Ranche on the Oxhide — Henry Inman
• Cattle Ranch to College — Russell Doubleday
• A Gunner Aboard the Yankee — Russell Doubleday
• A Midshipman in the Pacific — Cyrus Townsend Brady
• Yankee Ships and Yankee Sailors — James Barnes
• The Wrecking Master — Ralph D. Paine
• Cab and Caboose — Kirk Munroe
• Jeb Hutton — James B. Connolly
• Tecumseh’s Young Braves — Everett T. Tomlinson
• To the Land of the Caribou — Everett T. Tomlinson
• Tom Strong, Washington’s Scout — Alfred Bishop Mason
• Tom Paulding — Brander Matthews
• Adventures in Beaver Stream Camp — A. Radclyffe Dugmore

School and Sport

• The Half-Back — Ralph Henry Barbour
• For the Honor of the School — Ralph Henry Barbour
• College Years — Ralph D. Paine
• Bartley, Freshman Pitcher — William Heyliger
• Baby Elton, Quarter-Back — Leslie W. Quirk
• Danny Fists — Walter Camp
• Pitching in a Pinch — Christy Mathewson
• Tommy Remington’s Battle — Burton E. Stevenson
• Elliott Gray, Jr. — a story of West Point
• Redney McGaw — Arthur E. McFarlane
• Williams of West Point — Hugh S. Johnson

Making and Doing

• Boat Building and Boating — Daniel Carter Beard
• The Boy’s Book of New Inventions — Harry E. Maule

Pitching in a Pinch deserves a special note: it’s the memoir of Christy Mathewson, the Hall of Fame pitcher who was, at the time, the most admired athlete in America. The BSA put a real big-leaguer’s own book on the list. Imagine the modern equivalent.

Where Should a New Reader Start?

If your son has never read anything from this era, start with the classics column: Treasure Island and The Call of the Wild have never stopped working. For a taste of what original scouting fiction felt like, Along the Mohawk Trail is the standard bearer. For a boy who lives and breathes baseball, hand him Pitching in a Pinch and tell him who Mathewson was.

Every Boy’s Library was built on a simple idea: give a boy the right book at the right moment and you shape the man. The Adventures of Leo & Henry was written in that same conviction, for the boys of today.