I remember reading the lensmen books quite a long time ago. All I remember now is that all of the men seemed to have mighty thews. Someday, I'm going to have to look up 'thews'.

This wasn't as tightly organized a series as maybe some modern-day series would be. They were a bunch of SF magazine serials from the 1930s and 1940s pasted together as a series when they were published by one of the semi-pro SF book publishers that sprung up in the late 1940s. The book entitled "First Lensman" was written for this book-set publication. (If you ask me, the first volume, "Triplanetary," and the last, "Masters of the Vortex," were originally things that had little or nothing to do with the series, and were written into it with grafted-on material.) All in all, "Galactic Patrol" was probably a pretty good place to start reading it.

As I recall, too, there were a lot of complaints about how the magazine publications were better, because E. E. "Doc" Smith grafted material onto them all that "explained" what was going on, taking much of the mystery of it away. I can't vouch for that; I found them exciting as is---though I came to feel that destroying worlds inhabited by millions might produce feelings other than those on display in the books.

Frederik Pohl had an interesting commentary about "Doc" Smith on his blog; here it is, if the link works:

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Olaf...Stapledon? Oh yeah...good ol' OS...

Seriouly, that's a made up name, right? Right?

Great.