After the Stratemeyer Syndicate‘s trouble over the Dorothy Chester series (1907), Chatterton-Peck, and Evelyn Raymond, they still needed to offer series with girls as a protagonist. Their first long series of this type was the Dorothy Dale series under the “Margaret Penrose” pen name for Cupples & Leon beginning in 1908.
1. Dorothy Dale, a Girl of To-day (1908)
2. Dorothy Dale at Glenwood School (1908)
3. Dorothy Dale’s Great Secret (1909)
4. Dorothy Dale and Her Chums (1909)
5. Dorothy Dale’s Queer Holidays (1910)
6. Dorothy Dale’s Camping Days (1911)
7. Dorothy Dale’s School Rivals (1912)
8. Dorothy Dale in the City (1913)
9. Dorothy Dale’s Promise (1914)
10. Dorothy Dale in the West (1915)
11. Dorothy Dale’s Strange Discovery (1916)
12. Dorothy Dale’s Engagement (1917)
13. Dorothy Dale to the Rescue (1924)
The first volume has “To-day” hyphenated, the old-fashioned spelling used at the time and commonly seen in Stratemeyer’s letters.
Lilian C. Garis, wife of Howard and who also did some newspaper work for the Newark Evening News, was the ghostwriter for volumes 1-8 and 11 of the series.
Once Stratemeyer discovered that W. Bert Foster did well in writing stories for girls, he was asked to work on this one and he wrote volumes 9, 10, and 12 for the series.
Volume 13, written after a long gap, was written by Elizabeth Duffield Ward.
Since the books were published over a span of time, the overall quality of the bindings changed and the dust jackets, when you can find them, have a few different designs. The full-color jacket was in use by 1921 according to the other details in this copy. Grosset & Dunlap did not begin making full-color dust jackets until 1924 by way of comparison.