Introduction to The Tarzan Twins

When I was a kid growing up in the 1950s, only a handful of Tarzan books were available. They were Grosset & Dunlap reprints, and they were marketed for young adults.

In retrospect this seems rather strange, because from the day Edgar Rice Burroughs created him Tarzan had always—with the exception you hold in your hands—been sold to adult magazine and book markets. I suspect it was the subliterate Tarzan of the MGM films, as best (or at least, most often) exemplified by Johnny Weissmuller that led publishers to think anyone that learning-disabled couldn’t appeal to adults. (They were probably right. The problem is that Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan bore almost no resemblance to MGM’s.)

Anyway, Tarzan was a favorite of adults, selling millions of copies here and abroad during his first 14 years of existence. Then, in 1926, Burroughs got an interesting suggestion from Dr. J. C. Flowers, the president of the firm that had recently acquired the F. F. Voland Company: would he consider writing a Tarzan book aimed specifically at young adult readers? Burroughs hemmed and hawed and dragged his feet, but finally agreed to write a book for Volland called The Tarzan Twins.

Flowers was thrilled when he heard the title. He was less thrilled when Burroughs explained that the “twins” were to be cousins, Dick and Doc. Couldn’t they be twin brothers, Flowers wanted to know—but Burroughs was adamant.

Then came Flowers’ next suggestion: since they’re not really twins but cousins, couldn’t one of them be a girl? That way Volland would be putting out a book for all young adults rather than just young adult males.

Burroughs, whose stories reek of Victorian hang-ups about the sexes, refused again, this time because if the twins were going to have adventures in the wilds of the jungle, they would shortly be reduced to wearing nothing but loincloths, just like Tarzan. He planned to make them 14 years old, the age of his target audience, and since the book would be heavily illustrated, he couldn’t have a 14-year-old girl running around in a loincloth and nothing else. (I don’t know why not. I’d have bought it.)

Flowers kept asking questions and making suggestions, and Burroughs kept ignoring them and reassuring him that the only difference between this book and a regular Tarzan novel would be that “I am simply omitting the love scenes and using two boys about fourteen years of age as the principal characters.”

(Oh? You didn’t know about the “adult” scenes in other Tarzan books? Well, believe it or not, Tarzan has a fondness for absinthe and cigarettes, and occasionally loses all self-control when in the presence of mad queens or High Priestesses of the Flaming God—which is to say, every sixth book or so, he briefly loses his head and kisses one.)

In early 1927 Burroughs handed in the manuscript, which is about two teenaged cousins who are distantly related to Tarzan. They get lost and are captured by cannibals while on a trip to Tarzan’s African estates (yes, “estates”; Burroughs never used the singular for Tarzan’s holdings in 40+ years of writing about them. I picture farms and hunting reserves all the hell over the continent.) Flowers realized that there was a lot of adventure, but that Numa and Tantor and all the other animals everyone loved were missing—and so, incidentally, were little things like character development and anything resembling a plot. He and his editor, Margherita Osborne, asked Burroughs to add a quick 5,000 to 7,000 words to correct these omissions. Burroughs, who may or may not have thought of himself as an artist prior to typing “The End” but loved to consider himself a hard-nosed businessman thereafter, refused unless they paid him more money. It was then up to Volland, and Flowers elected to go with the manuscript as it stood, hiring Douglas Grant as the illustrator. Burroughs approved Grant’s illos in mid-August, and the book came out on October 10, 1927.

The silence was deafening.

Sure that they must be doing something wrong, that it was impossible for Burroughs to write a Tarzan book that didn’t sell zillions of copies, they put out a second edition, this time in a gorgeous box.

The book promptly won an award from the American Society of Graphic Arts, so Flowers knew that any lack of sales wasn’t Volland’s fault. Burroughs couldn’t believe the poor sales either, and tended to blame poor proof reading (unlike most writers, who realize that the galleys are the last point at which you can catch a mistake and avoid looking like an idiot in public, he evidently didn’t proof his own galleys).

Well, the book ran through seven editions from Volland. Eventually it earned a few dollars, but not enough to encourage either party to write a planned sequel with a somewhat-less-undressed teenaged girl as a main character.

Burroughs took a final half-hearted whack at the young adult market before turning it over to Hollywood and the comic books when he produced Tarzan and the Tarzan Twins With Jad-Bal-Ja the Golden Lion, which was published by Whitman (the publisher of Big Little Books) in March of 1936. It sold for 29 cents, and was at least as much a coloring book as a Tarzan book. Canaveral Press combined the two in a handsome hardcover edition, illustrated by Roy G. Krenkel in 1963.

Though it’s seen a few publishers and a few editions (and a few illustrators, though none in Krenkel’s class), this has always been the rarest of the Tarzan books. It’s interesting to compare Burroughs’ notion of a young adult book (this one) to Grosset & Dunlap’s notion (Tarzan of the Apes), and of course it’s always nice to have any Burroughs book, even one as atypical as The Tarzan Twins, back in print.