Edgar Rice Burroughs, the Princess of Mars, and Phillips Academy

In admiring a recent chart in The New York Times listing the largest prep school endowments in the country, we remembered that Edgar Rice Burroughs attended Phillips Academy, Andover. With an $800 million endowment and notable alumni such as Humphrey Bogart and George W. Bush, we assumed that the academy’s Oliver Wendell Holmes Library would hold copies of Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars (1917) and the other novels in his Barsoom series.

Much to our surprise, the library does not own a copy of A Princess of Mars. As some constellation, the library does have these Barsoom novels:

• Three Martian Novels: Thuvia, Maid of Mars. The Chessmen of Mars. The Master Mind of Mars (Dover, 1962)

• Llana of Gathol (Ballantine, 1963)

• Swords of Mars, and Synthetic Men of Mars (Doubleday, 1966, 1963, illustrations by Frank Frazetta)

• The Gods of Mars, and The Warlord of Mars (Doubleday, 1971, illustrations by Frank Frazetta)