Ralph Gardner, who died March 30 at age 81, was a newspaperman and advertising executive who amassed what was probably the finest collection of Horatio Alger first editions and memorabilia, created the first exhaustive bibliography of Alger’s writings, and published the biography “Horatio Alger, or the American Hero Era.”

Alger’s oeuvre was potboilers about poor urban youths who make good, with titles like “Ragged Dick” and “Phil the Fiddler.” The books, wildly popular in the late 19th century, were already out of fashion at the time Gardner discovered a trove of them in a barn in Maine at age 13, but he was captivated.

Gardner’s own life was hardly as ragged as one of Alger’s boys. He grew up in a Fifth Avenue apartment building where tenants included Clare Boothe Luce, A.J. Liebling, and Stan Laurel. A family treasure was a framed portrait of Albert Einstein, a souvenir of the days when the physicist taught young Ralph how to play chess, while visiting a friend in the building.

Gardner attended Dewitt Clinton High School, where he worked on the student newspaper, and then found work as messenger and office boy to Arthur Hay Sulzberger, publisher of the New York Times. During World War II, Gardner joined the Army and served as a correspondent for Yank. After the war he stayed in Europe and worked at Times bureaus in Paris and Frankfurt.

Returning to America in the late 1940s, Gardner worked in a number of roles for the Times – night photo editor, advertising department – before leaving in 1955 to start his own advertising agency. Among his clients were Pilsner Urquel and Polish hams. At one point, Gardner convinced the Secret Service to allow President Eisenhower to pose for a photo with one of his canned hams. It seemed like a marketing coup until he realized he couldn’t use the president to advertise.

Through dogged research, Gardner built up his collection of Alger and other American juvenile literature in first editions, and he put together the first comprehensive bibliography of Alger’s writings. He traveled to numerous auctions, and told the story of going to Queens to purchase some volumes of Alger from an old woman. She also had a first edition of Mark Twain’s “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” but Gardner hadn’t brought enough money to buy it.

Gardner also collected the magazines that originally serialized the tales, as well as masses of Alger ephemera, such as hotel registers containing Alger’s signature. The materials filled several filing cabinets, which Gardner labeled his “Alger Machine.”

Gardner’s Alger biography, which was first published in 1964, included rather whimsical elements, such as imagined conversations with the author, as well as an evaluation of his work and influence. It did not make reference to Alger’s pedophilia, a subject that came to widespread knowledge only with later biographies.

“He was the first person to do a lot of research on Alger,” the co-author of “The Lost Life of Horatio Alger” (1985), Jack Bales, said. “The bibliography was a pioneering effort.”

Gardner was instrumental in the republication in 1973 of a lost Alger work, “Silas Snobden’s Office Boy,” which had somehow failed to make its way from serial to publisher in 1889.

Gardner was a founding member of the Horatio Alger Society, a charitable organization devoted to scholarship on all subjects Alger. He would appear at annual meetings puffing a pipe with a bowl fashioned after Alger’s head.

He was also a member of the Baker Street Irregulars, the Sherlock Holmes fan club. In 1974, Gardner founded a weekly book review and interview show on WVNJ radio. The show ran through 1987, and excerpts were published in “Writers Talk to Ralph Gardner” (1989), featuring an introduction by Rod McKuen.

“As literature, Alger’s works are meager at best,” Gardner told the Christian Science Monitor in 1978. Somehow this did not damp his enthusiasm for them, and he confessed that two of his favorites were “Frank Fowler” and “The Eerie Train Boy.” “I still go back and read them again and again,” Gardner said.

Ralph David Gardner

Born April 16, 1923, in New York; died March 30 of complications of diabetes; survived by his wife, Nellie Jaglom Gardner, and sons James, Ralph Jr., and Peter.