During the summers of his teaching career, and before and after that service, he had numerous unusual adventures in seldom trod places, some of which were recounted in more than a half-dozen travel books.
Other book-length works, some published in series, focused on academic subjects, citizenship, great lives, patriotism, and speech, among other matters.
Law had a deep love of travel to exotic places from the time of his junior year at Amherst, thereafter spending every summer visiting far off destinations.
He ventured in 1926 on a five-month journey – variously by foot, boat, raft, bicycle, dug-out canoe, and camel—from Cape Town to Cairo when Africa was still largely untamed.
He was rescued by Muhammadan priests from a desert fanatic in Jerusalem; pursued by a street mob in Italy; attacked by a Shoshone Indian; watched as a spy in czarist Russia; held up while alone on horseback in Peru; visited various African villages during times of cholera and the Black Death, and being bitten by tsetse flies; jailed in the Argentine on suspicion of being a smuggler; arrested in Germany for being on a train without a ticket.
He was almost killed by cannibals in the Fiji Islands before performing calisthenics, which the natives found so hilarious that he was an honored guest at their dinner – and not in a Hannibal Lector way.
(His account of that experience, “Cannibal Gymnastics,” was reprinted about a hundred years later in a 2003 anthology, The Rupa Book of Travellers’ Tales, published in New Delhi, India.
The books include the following,[7] not necessarily a complete list: • Ad Miriam (poetry) (1909) • A Guide to the Discussion of the D.W. Griffith Production, “Abraham Lincoln,” Starring Walter Huston • Call to Adventure (1935) (ed.)
• Modern Plays, Short and Long (1924) • Modern Short Stories (1924) • Modern Short Stories: A book for high schools (1918) (edited and introduction) • Our Class Visits South America (1930) • Reading for Skill: Practical exercises for remedial reading and library skill (1936) (co-author) • Robert Southey’s Life of Nelson (1917) (with Robert Southey) • Selections from American Poetry, With Special Attention to Longfellow, Whittier, Poe and Lowell (1915) • Shakespeare’s Henry V, by Frederick Houk Law and William Shakespeare (1914) • Sister Clementia (novel) (1910) • Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1916) • Stories of To-Day and Yesterday (30 selected short stories) (1930) • Tales and Poems, by Edgar Allan Poe and Frederick Houk Law (1914) • The Alhambra: A series of tales and sketches of the Moors and Spaniards (Academy Classics) by Washington Irving (ed.)
• The Blue Book of Effective Speech: Seven courses of study designed for self-instruction in practical speech, in daily life, in business and on public occasions including simple parliamentary law (1932) • The Heart of Sindhra (novel) (1898) • The Life of the World: And Other Poems (poetry) (1899) • The Red Badge of Courage & A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (ed.)