The world's favorite tractor salesman calls it quits and joins the army in the fifth installment of the Alexander Botts series,
Botts Goes to War
. In this volume of short stories written in the 1940s and set during WWII, farm machines have proven themselves indispensable to the war effort, and who better to equip war-torn Europe than Alexander Botts?
Throughout the book, Botts encounters shortages of necessary materials, including rubber tires, cable, structural steel, and even civilian housing. Botts responds to each situation with characteristically unique and ill-advised approaches, such as sinking a tractor not once but twice to hide it from competitors or using priceless one-hundred-year old apple liqueur as fuel. Whether he finds success or failure so devastating that he is shipped off to another command, he survived to take on another assignment.
Alexander Botts was created in 1927 by author William Hazlett Upson. The stories are based on Upson's work as a service mechanic and troubleshooter for the Caterpillar Tractor Company. For almost half a century, Botts was beloved by
The
Saturday Evening Post
readers in more than 100 short stories. This book features two stories that did not originally appear in
The Post.
The series will be the first to present the collection in its entirety along with the original illustrations.