For a hundred years, loose copyright laws and a hungry reading public meant that books could be published without an author's permission with extraordinary ease. Authors gained fame but suffered financially. The literary pirates were known as bookaneers. On the eve of the twentieth century, a new international treaty is signed to stop this literary underground. On Samoa, a dying Robert Louis Stevenson labors over a new novel. The thought of one last...

"When a college graduate with a history of hapless jobs (ice cream scooper; gift wrapper; laziest ever part-time clerk at the Pet Library) reads Robert Louis Stevenson's novel Treasure Island, she is dumbstruck by the timid design of her life. ... Convinced that Stevenson's book is cosmically intended for her, she redesigns her life according to its core values: boldness, resolution, independence, and horn-blowing. Accompanied by her mother, her sister,...

"The young Robert Louis Stevenson, living in a boarding house in San Francisco while waiting for his beloved's divorce from her feckless husband, dreamed of writing a soaring novel about his landlady's adventurous and globe-trotting husband--but he never got around to it. And very soon thereafter he was married, headed home to Scotland, and on his way to becoming the most famous novelist in the world, after writing such classics as Treasure Island,...

"A book so iconic that its title is synonymous with split personalities, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson was first released in 1886. The story of a virtuous Dr. Jekyll who mistakenly creates an alter ego of unadulterated evil serves as an examination of the duality of human nature and the battle between good and evil. Full of mystery and fright, this story has remained popular for more than a century...

Combines an account of Robert Louis Stevenson's experiences as he traveled from New York to California by train in 1879 and a description of the building and operation of railroads in nineteenth-century America.

Their Uncle Dan is still missing and Carter and Isabelle are starting to worry, especially after they receive a threatening call from the computer hacker--and he challenges them to match wits with him in Treasure Island.

"A portrait of the fascinating, unusual and fruitful creative partnership between Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson"--