The Story Paper (Such As It Was)

Or
What Killed the Story Papers:
A Mystery in One Part
(Despite the fact that they didn’t really die until the 1970s
And were never that big of a deal in the first place,
At least in the United States—and very few people
Even some historians
Have the vaguest idea what
They were.)
Or
It’s hard to wax nostalgic about a medium
That had a golden age between 1830 and 1850,
Especially when what is notable about the age
Is missing from the medium.

Or it’s time for me to think of a topic sentence, already and leave the snarky bits for later on. You know, get people interested before taking pot shots at long dead people. I only mention the subject of Story Papers because they are name dropped without names so reverently in so many histories. It’s somewhat hard to say anything about them because almost none survived. Just as we have it on the word of the National Police Gazette that there were other scandal rags in the 1840s, most of what we know about the history of Story Papers comes from the publishers of Dime Novels and Pulps. They remember the things quite vividly. No one else does.

Pulp Fiction has existed through various vehicles for a very long time. Each vehicle can be said to have made its contribution. The contribution of Dime Novels, a type of Story Paper, is two fold. Number one, it gave us the sort of run on title convention that I used in the preamble to this piece. It was sort of a take off on the method newspapers of the 1800s used to sell their headlines. Old newspaper men knew that a headline was a sales tool. If you really want to sell something, try at least three times. This oddball convention lasted straight through the silent picture era. It was last seen in lampoon form, highlighted as episode titles for segments of Bullwinkle & Rocky. (Jay Ward was the type of guy who didn’t care if you got his jokes the first time—he’d try twice more.) The second contribution was a bit more lasting: for the publisher of a given magazine to own all of the characters that appear in it. Corporations devised characters built to please their audiences and then hired hacks to fill out their adventures. That really was a first.

Most of what we know about Story Papers we know about the Dime Novel versions of the form. And there’s been more than enough verbiage spent splitting hairs on what is what. (Heck knows, I have.) My definition of a Story Paper is that it is a newspaper that has a focus other than news. Since our focus is fiction, we are going to stick to the classes of Story Paper which feature such. In the United States, there really are not many. The other Story Papers we are going to call Family Papers. A Family Paper may have fiction in it, but it is not the lead focus.

Story Papers were not the only vehicle of pulp fiction in their time. There are other concurrent forms which we will touch on lightly. There is no mystery as to what a Story Paper physically is. It is a tabloid newspaper—an accumulated, unbound, half bed-sheet newspaper. What locally produced newspapers there are today are mostly tabloids. A Dime Novel (or Yellowback) by contrast, is a specialized sized sheet of newsprint, center staple bound, with color splashed on its cover. Almost any newspaper press can churn out a tabloid. Most Dime Novels were the products of specialty presses which did nothing but print them up. Story Papers are the sideline of newspaper printers. Both forms were really given birth to by the steam engine and are byproducts of a new byproduct—unused press capacity. Before the steam engine, there was no such thing.

A funny thing happened on the way to thinking up ideas for using excess press capacity—there suddenly wasn’t any. People who had once spent as much as a quarter for 8 pages of folded bedsheet that appeared every other day or so suddenly became not willing to spend more than a dime for 50 pages of such, which they expected to come out in several editions during the course of the day. Competition is a funny thing and the steam engine was more of a slave driver than a liberator. One does wonder at what time our supposed ideas for using up non existent excess press capacity took place?

It specifically took place between 1830 and 1850. By the time rails have spread, your Story Paper is completely deceased, replaced utterly by the Dime Novel or things which look like the Dime Novel. Although Dime Novels will hold on almost through the 1930s, most of the things that look like Dime Novels will be gone just as soon as the Civil War is finished. I speak of the Diem Novel as a type of Story Paper, because it is, but it is also an entity very distinct from the Story Paper. Which is to say that other than to tell you that a Story Paper is a tabloid with fiction as its focus, I have told you nothing.

Cue that kind of music they play for historic things while I name drop: Charles Dickens, Edgar Allen Poe, Mark Twain, Conan Doyle, Bret Harte, O. Henry and Horaitio Alger. It’s a damn impressive list of names that have been associated with the Story Papers. It’s a pity none of these writers wrote for them. Granted, Conan Doyle and Dickens are straw men, being English, and most of the names I have mentioned wrote outside of my mythical 1830-1850 Story Paper Golden Age. (Neither Doyle nor O Henry are alive during the era.) I apologize profusely for having made up a Golden Age for Story Papers, but there doesn’t seem to be one otherwise.

The definition of Story Papers itself comes from the splitting of hairs—what few there are to find. I mention Dickens, since he is the original paid by the word hack who churned out cliffhangers that turned out to be masterpieces. He was not. He was the highest paid writer of his day. His works were serialized as a method of amortizing his royalty—and they appeared often after having first been seen in book form. (The history of English Story Papers is very different from American ones.) Moreover, Dickens works appeared in newspaper newspapers, not Story Paper newspapers. I mention the later Conan Doyle since his character has been listed as the inspiration for so many Dime Novel heroes. These were much later Dime Novels. Doyle’s work itself appeared in a soft bound magazine—a quite nice thing—and not a Story Paper or even a pulp magazine. Harte and Twain, Dickens’ contemporaries, and contemporaries of the Story Paper era, were newspaper newspaper men and not contributors to Story Papers. O. Henry is a Story Paper guy only early on and only if you consider the self published as published. Later on, he is a magazine guy and a newspaper newspaper guy. Twain, Harte and Poe are only Story Paper guys if you consider lit mags as a part of the Story Paper subset. Horatio Algier is a Dime Novel guy who lasts until the pulp era. He is a Story Paper guy if you exclude Dime Novels from Story Papers, but only tangentially.

Boy, it does sound like I’m splitting hairs, don’t it? Trust me, if there really was nothing there I would spare you this and flat out say so. Historically speaking, you can’t lump Dime Novels in with Story Papers. They are completely different and need their own space. (They would become 99.9% of the medium on their own.) If we lump in lit mags with the overall population of Story Papers it is with the caution that they represent 1% of the total. So what the hell am I talking about?

The majority of the purely literary Story Papers—ones packaging fiction as fiction—are house organs for book publishers. They existed to tempt you into buying a book or getting your library to buy one. These contained snippets of books, sometimes a serialization of an old book or one which had yet to be printed. A few of them functioned as a literary minor league, but most were in the service of hawking the wares of hardbound publishers. If a new serial had elicited some interest, but not enough to justify a book, the story would appear in accrued form as a Dime Novel. That’s how Dime Novels got their start. With the lit mags, these are 50% of the market. Then there are the Story Papers which are comprised of titillating tales of no literary value, sometimes involving famous people or characters from history. These are also the products of major hard bound publishing houses, only they are not putting their names on it. Much of the more popular of this dreck is also re circulated as Dime Novels. This is another way that Dime Novels got their starts. These titillating non lit periodicals are a profitable and discrete 10% of the market. Then we have the non-fiction fiction, papers such as the National Police Gazette which specialize in telling us that the world is filled with Indian battles, orgies, incest, murder, theft, mayhem and ghosts—all packaged around girlie pictures and containing advertisements for more girlie pictures or instructions for cock fighting or dog fighting. That’s about another 30% of the market. Papers attempting to do a little bit of everything is 10%.Writing stand alone fictional stories about real outlaws soon became a staple of the Dime Novels. Being sued by the relatives of these outlaws was one of the reasons the Dime Novels came up with fictional people. (Or they rented real people to fictionalize, like Buffalo Bill Cody.) Line drawn captioned porn advertising photographic playing cards of porn is the other 10%. No Mark Twain here.

You can see how the Dime Novels sort of feed off the Story Papers, at least at first. That didn’t last. Dime Novels went off and became their own thing. What I have described is what the Story Papers looked like at their height. It is largely the haven of publishers with very narrow interests or material which is untouchable for general periodicals. That’s something of an established pattern for pulp fiction.

The Story Papers were having the same problem as the Family Papers. The now steam infused newspaper is expanding and sucking up all sorts of topics into the genre of the general newspaper. It is doing so largely at the expense of the Family Paper. It is not so much the audience that it is sucking away, but rather the content. Moreover, this content is being spread over several platforms via the internet. Not exactly. We’re talking about the 1800s here.

The advent of the steam press caused per unit production costs to drop. If they had stuck to 8 page newspapers, this would have been a massive windfall. The audience for newspapers, however, was not infinite. Once two or more people have steam presses, the average sized town will soon have more than enough press capacity. This caused the newspapers to start buying each other up and then eventually to bulk up. It also trimmed the profits on the newspapers as a whole. Then as today, many newspapers cost more to print than they are actually sold for. They made their money off of advertising exclusively—another numbers driven game. In order to share the costs of new features, newspapers started buying papers in different cities. They bulked up on features which travelled well—the heart of the Family Paper—and distributed those features to their outlets via the telegraph enabled wire services. This process of ownership consolidation, bulking up of the paper by acquiring new features and sharing features via wire service started with the steam press and continued unabated through the Civil War, stunting the growth of Family Papers from the onset. Including works of fiction, serialized novels and short stories, was incorporated early on into the newspaper’s general presentation. Wire services outbid and muscled the Story papers from their very beginnings. It was not a war the Story Papers were going to win. The media consolidation, the concentration of print wealth, continued even after the Civil War,

As Frank Munsey commented to Time magazine in 1924, after another spate of newspaper mergers :“New York has continued longer in its multiplicity of newspapers than any other big town in the country. Chicago, that once had five or six morning papers, has now returned to two. St. Louis with four or five at one time finally came down to two. After struggling along with two for ten years, one had to go by the board and become amalgamated with the other. Now the great town of St. Louis has only one. The same is true of Denver and New Orleans, Indianapolis, Cleveland, Detroit, and so it goes."

Munsey was, of course, one of the great consolidators and amalgamators of newspapers himself by the 1920s. He did not, however, start that way. He started as a Story Paper owner. We here in pulp magazine history land remember him as the founder of the Pulp Magazine format. We will use both Munsey and his fellow Story Paper owner Courtland Young as examples of what happened to the Story Paper industry over time.

We have to drop another shoe before either Young or Munsey get involved with the already unattractive Story Paper business. Right after the Civil War new lithographic presses appeared which could mass reproduce photographs on special slick paper stock. This new paper stock gave rise to a new periodical form which we today call the magazine. Initially magazines are all about photographs. If you can think of a subject and take pictures of it, someone is going to produce a magazine on the topic. The field went from non existent in 1864 to thousands of titles by 1870.

Most magazines were fairly expensive and, as such, were targeted at the well to do. Since they were targeted at the well to do, they made fine vehicles for advertising also targeted at the well to do. It was a nice chummy club the magazines had invented: they made a profit on their cover price and they charged a premium for their targeted advertising space.

This prompted the newspaper industry to set out on a concentrated effort to destroy them. That sounds like hyperboli on my part. It isn’t. They wanted the audience and they wanted the advertisers. Although they could not print daily papers on slick stock—it was mechanically impossible and economically suicidal to try—they could buy litho presses and come up with a stuffed in slick paper section which could them be shared by various outlets. Soon there were several of these slick paper magazine sections coming free with various editions of the chain newspapers.

The effort on the part of the newspapers was a success and the entire magazine industry died. Sort of. It was the biggest die out of magazines prior to the advent of radio. Once the magazines established a profitable genre, the newspapers would replicate it and then that segment would fold. It was a domino effect, the number of magazine genres folding with the number of slick paper newspaper inserts expanding. It made the magazines rethink their strategies.

At is at this point that we can enter Frank Munsey and Courtland Young. Young has started what I call a Family Paper in New York called American Clubman. It is a monthly targeted at the well to do—the type of man who enjoys membership at one of the many exclusive social clubs in New York and other big cities. He winds up having two problems. First, the social club scene has faded. Women’s Suffrage has done them in, forcing the men to come up with a sport—such as golf—as a way to meet in places without them cootie infested female types. What urban clubs that remain are now hen houses for the well to do hen pecked. Second, the idea that the well to do would like to read about themselves and that advertisers would be more than willing to pay a premium to appear in a section that will draw well to do eyeballs has already occurred to the people who think up slick sections for newspapers. Within two issues, Mister Young knows he is looking failure straight in the face.

He changes the magazine’s name to Young’s Magazine and comes up with a gimmick. From now on he will solicit material from the very people he was covering. They will essentially write the magazine for him and then support it out of vanity. Thanks to the desires of the well to do to have their random thoughts, short stories and novellas read far and wide, Young’s Magazine soon gains national distribution. Not bad for a vanity press. Finding a niche and not having exacting literary standards are the keys to successful Story Paper operation. He is not strictly in Story Papers for that long. In order to accommodate shipment via rails and the mails (tabloids travel poorly) he converts Young’s into a Dime Novel. At least in size. It is one of those things that looks like a Dime Novel, but isn’t. Because it doesn’t have continuing characters owned by the publisher and isn’t targeted at juveniles, it really is a Story Paper in Dime Novel form.

Young then goes back to his original idea of covering a specific scene, in his next try the emerging Jazz and music club scene. Again, he produces Dime Novels on the topic, for Jazz the forgettable Droll Stories. Again, he turns vanity press and starts soliciting material from the very people he is covering. It had some surprising results, which are detailed in the Laughing Wallflower in the Modern Thrills section of the HIL-GLE website. After 20 years of putzing around like this, he decides to leverage his national distribution by launching an anthology Dime Novel series of girls smut written by actual professional writers called Breezy Stories. The next thing you know, old Courtland is a millionaire. (Spoiler Alert.) He may now build snazzy offices overlooking Washington Square and chase chorus girls for the rest of his life.

Mister Munsey is not anywhere as well situated, even at first. He has launched a Story Paper which is targeted at juveniles, a knock off of the middling successful Youth’s Companion, called Argosy. Argosy is something less than a roaring success for its first ten years, as Munsey explains in the 1907 Founding of the Munsey Publishing House: “Moreover, I know now that of all of the deadly schemes for publishing, that of juvenile publishing is the worst. It is hopeless. There is nothing in it—no foundation to it. One never has a circulation that stays with him; for as boys and girls mature they take adult periodicals. It is a question of building new all the while. Then again, the advertiser has no use for such mediums. He wants to talk to money-spenders—not dependents—not children.”

That took Munsey ten years and a lot of leveraged money to figure out. Initially his Argosy featured the top name in the field, Horatio Alger. After he ran out of funds for top names, Munsey began writing the magazine himself. His stories were a little different, pressed as he was by time constraints and impending financial doom. Through trial and error, he stumbled onto a genre we today call Soft Science Fiction and was the number one writer and sole publisher in the field for about ten years. Munsey was a fair dreamer and an excellent getter of things done—two necessary pulp writer traits—but he wasn’t making a mint at it.

What he had was an under-illustrated Dime Novel in Story Paper form, targeted at the Dime Novel’s core juvenile audience. With the sudden spread of the newspaper color comics section, the rug fell out from that market, too. “Something was wrong. I didn’t know what it was. I assumed that the trouble was with juvenile papers, for The Argosy was not alone in its lack of response to the efforts of publishers. (Frank Munsey, Founding of the Munsey Publishing House 1907) Not only was Argosy crashing, the market leader Youth’s Companion folded shop.

It wasn’t just the juveniles. All of the Story Papers were being hit. Again, it was part of an effort launched by the newspaper industry, but not necessarily targeted at Story Papers per se. The number of slick magazine sections had proliferated to the point of logistical impossibility. Handling the parts and assembly on a day to day basis was becoming prohibitive. It was at this point that the chains launched an industry wide initiative to concentrate the circulation of stuff ins to two days a week, Thursday and Sunday. Eventually Sunday became the big deal, with newspapers becoming mere bedsheet wraps for piles of slick magazines to be consumed throughout the week.

From the same source, Munsey gives us the Story Paper’s epitaph “I think, in justice to myself, I was one of the first men in the publishing business to realize that the weekly publication was a dead cock in the pit… Up to a quarter century ago the weekly newspaper was a great feature in the publishing business in America, as it is today in Europe. But the incoming of the great big Sunday newspaper meant the outgoing of the weekly with us. In England they have nothing like our Sunday papers…”

That fairly much was the end of it for Story Papers. Some did survive, as Family Papers dedicated to women’s hobby interests, such as sewing. The last of them folded in the 1970s. It was never much of a vehicle and never all that unique in content. It’s apparent descendant, today’s scandal rag, is not a literal one. The Story Paper scandal rags mostly became pulp magazines, if they survived at all. No paper that started in the 1800s as a scandal slinger has survived to this day, even in annexed form.

More typical is the path trail blazed by Munsey and then followed up by the likes of Courtland Young. Munsey discovered that his Soft Science Fiction prose had an audience beyond the juveniles and came up with an affordable magazine format to house it in. His real innovation was in creating magazines for mass circulation as opposed to snob appeal. His pulp magazines were not, if fact, typical pulps. He had slick advertising pages targeted at the everyman laced into his pulp stock interiors. It eventually gave birth to an industry—and after 25 years of putzing around Munsey too was a teenage mutant turtle overnight success, who then proceeded to have a (spoiler alert) Michael Jordan meets baseball type career as a newspaper publisher.

Courtland Young’s approach was a bit more typical. Having made the change to Dime Novels, he stuck slick covers on them once slicks came to be in vogue. Once Munsey’s pulps showed up, it made these slick Dime Novels look a little thin in contrast. At that point the flush with cash Young bought himself a pulp press and called it a day.

We will have some additional notes next time.

***