Cheaper by the Dozen at 75

By James Gifford

The autobiographical novel Cheaper by the Dozen was published in 1948 and almost immediately became one of America's most popular and best-loved books... still in print, still in libraries and still widely read today. 2023 will be the astonishing 75th anniversary of this wonderful book's publication.

But Cheaper was written just before the 1950s, about events in the 1920s. It uses terms and phrases, and has situations that might not be familiar to today's readers. From understanding the meaning of '20s slang to grasping 1920s social and family issues, the warm and amusing Gilbreth family stories may be a little more remote to today's readers... and that's everyone's loss.

Furthermore, most of the family members in these stories were still alive when the book was published, so siblings Frank and Ernestine Gilbreth artfully fictionalized the stories and events.

This "reader's companion" is a guide to the world of Cheaper by the Dozen and the sprawling Gilbreth family, with notes to explain the meaning and context of terms, events and social settings, and the real story behind many of the family adventures. Written in the same warm, inviting tone as the book itself, these annotations will bring a fading world back to vibrant color for both new and old readers.

Written by an expert biographer and historian of the Gilbreth family (who is currently completing a full-scale history and multi-person biography of the family), the details and and the amusing and sometimes startling 'real story' are presented not as a revision or rewrite, but as... a knowledgeable companion on a literary journey.

(Note: this companion volume does not contain the novel itself. It is meant for co-reading with any edition of the original book, especially any of the hardcover editions for which reference page numbers are provided.)

• Language: English
• Publisher: James Gifford
• Release date: Aug 5, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005440251

Book preview

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Cheaper

by the

Dozen

at 75

A 75th Anniversary Reader’s Companion

for One of America’s Best-Loved Books

James Gifford

Nitrosyncretic Press

Denver, Colorado

Coming soon from the same author:

The Gilbreths: An Extraordinary American Family

A comprehensive family biography and history

(Nitrosyncretic Press, 2024)

See TheGilbreths.com for details and more!

©2022 James Gifford

All Rights Reserved

This book is a companion to the 1948 autobiographical novel Cheaper by the Dozen, by Frank B. Gilbreth Jr and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey.

In respect of copyright, it contains none of that work’s text. Readers will need their own copy of the book to make much use of this one. Page numbers refer to the original hardcover edition, which is widely available from used book sources.

This book may be freely copied and distributed in electronic format as long as (1) it remains intact and unmodified, with no content added or removed; (2) it includes all text on this copyright page intact; (3) it is not converted into any other format, electronic or printed; and (4) no charge whatsoever is made for its use, access or duplication.

Contact the author regarding any other re-use including translation.

Nitrosyncretic Press

www.Nitrosyncretic.com

Foreword: Seventy-Five Years of Gilbreths

It has been some fifty years since I first read, and fell in love with, Cheaper by the Dozen. As for millions who first made this American classic an instant best-seller—my worn and treasured sixth printing is dated February, 1949, just three months after publication—and then perennially discovered it on library shelves, these warm and absurd tales made the Gilbreth family my own.

It was the first book for both Frank Jr. and Ernestine, and while both would go on to write more, it is still astonishing that a rookie collaboration (even one including a seasoned journalist) produced such a polished and timeless gem.

Unlike a few other early literary discoveries, I don’t remember exactly when I first read Cheaper. Somewhere late in grade school, fifth or sixth grade. I’ve lost count of how many times I re-read it in the years to follow, one of those comfortable old shoe books you pull from the shelf when you want a pleasant hour rather than the effort of new discoveries.

I was perhaps thirty when my curiosity bug kicked in and I re-read the two sequels (Belles on Their Toes, 1950 and Time Out for Happiness, 1970), then sought out the 1949 biography of the parents (Frank and Lillian Gilbreth: Partners for Life, Edna Yost), and then started the more difficult (pre-internet, pre-Amazon, pre-ABEbooks) search for the other books by Frank Jr. and Ernestine. About the time I exhausted that search, I started looking for the books by Frank and Lillian, and then found the first new book in years, a biography of Lillian, and—well, suffice it to say that I soon had an exceptionally complete library of books by and about the Gilbreths, both family and engineers.

But my curiosity only intensified as I realized that huge parts of the story were still missing. The ‘family lore’ books like Cheaper are charming, but selective. The 1949 dual biography is extensive, but focuses entirely on the careers of Frank and Lillian, and furthermore on a fairly short period of their lives. Two fairly recent biographies of Lillian are quite deeply researched, but dense, scholarly reads and even more focused on a particular interpretation of her life and work.

My curiosity simply would not let go at this point, so I began a deeper research effort, looking beyond things already written about Gilbreths to things written long ago and all but lost, and what records I could find of family and career and business. The first goal that coalesced was, oddly enough, an annotated edition of Cheaper by the Dozen. I had no approach to the authors or the family or a publisher or much of anything; although I was a veteran writer this was something between hobby and obsession. Adding notes to this wonderful book, like those penciled in my own copy, just seemed like a good idea for all the other readers out there who wondered what lay just beyond the end of each chapter.

But it did not take me long to realize that far from filling out some corners of the Gilbreth story, all we readers really had were corners… of a story that had yet to be told. The scope of the truly extraordinary Gilbreth–Bunker–Delger–Moller family is almost impossibly sprawling, chock full of fascinating people and events only sketched in all of Frank Jr.’s eight books of family lore, and barely touched in the first of them. So the charming idea of a few annotations and footnotes was crushed under what has become a massive multi-person family biography and history, well past 200,000 words even with a large middle section of material yet to be completed. If you are reading this—if you are enough of an admirer of the Gilbreth story to have found this little companion interesting— you’ll love what’s yet to come. Progress is steady but slower than I had planned; I now hope to publish the complete biography/history by the centenary year of Frank Sr.’s death, about two years from now.

But in one of the