“Frankly Scarlet, I don’t give a damn.”
The Dime Novels are worthy of mention primarily due to their fantastic longevity. We are talking about a medium which lasted from 1830 to roughly 1937. During this time there were only three short phases wherein new material was being put into its system. For the most part, it was a reprint medium, constantly trucking out the same materials, decade after decade, to a very age-specific audience. Nearly everyone who was a young man in the United States from the 1850s to the 1910s went through a “Dime Novel Phase.” It’s not as odd as you think. We see this trend in children’s literature today.
I wish this was the place I could say we get the Hardy Boys from or Nancy Drew or even Danny Dunn or maybe even the Wizard of Oz—all wonderful and memorable children’s books—but that is not the case. In fact, there is very little to recommend the Dime Novels for. No great authors were introduced. No great stories were told. They did something to introduce Beatrix Potter to the American audience and they kept the miserable Horatio Alger in print long past the time when people should have known better. During its initial phase it was a haven for people who wrote exactly like James Fennimore Cooper and nearly never signed their real names to the stuff. Later it was low brow material and still later it was strictly juvenile material. For most of their existence they constituted a vast largely public domain blockade of material which discouraged publishers from getting into the children’s market. Any card store or five and dime could order up a few hundred of these things for about five bucks. The shipper would arrive with its own display case filled with hundreds of separate titles all in small quantities. And there it would sit, a fairly low margin, low volume item—perfect for dollar stores, if dollar stores existed at the time. It was on a par with penny candy, sustained itself through nostalgia waves and lost traction very slowly.
By being on a par with penny candy, I do not mean to say that it was quick to consume. The average Dime Novel was 128 digest sized pages—not Harry Potter, but generous for a dime. By penny candy, I mean that the profit was not very high. It was something cheap you could toss at children to occupy a whole hell of a lot of their time. There was a lot of it, too. You could spend every waking instant of your tweens reading it and really not make a dent in the available supply. The following is a sample of the dates of issue and titles in various series. Please keep in mind that each title or “library” is likely to have dozens of individual issues and that, once produced, no issue really went out of print.
New York Mercury (1838), New York Ledger (1848), Ned Buntline’s Own (1848), The True American (1854), Beadle & Adam’s Dime Novels (1860), American Library (1861), American Tales (1861), Camp and Fireside Library (1861), Ten Cent Novels (1861), Dawley's War Novel (1865), Saturday Journal (1865), Frank Leslie's Chimney Corner(1865), Street & Smith’s New York Weekly (1865), Saturday Night (1865), Ten Penny Novels (1865), Our Young Folks (1865, 1873), Dime Book of Fun (1866), Oliver Optic's Magazine--Our Boys and Girls (1867), Frank Leslie's Boys' and Girls' Weekly (1867), Munro's Fireside Companion (1867), Illuminated Western World (1869), New York Family Story Paper (1873), Girls and Boys of America (1873), Boys of New York (1875), Boys of the World (1875), The Young Men of America (1877), Boys of New York Pocket Library (1880), Old Sleuth Library (1880), New York Detective Library (1882), Old Cap Collier Library (1882), Five Cent Weekly Library (1883), War Library (1883), The Golden Library (1885), Little Chief Library (1886), The Saturday Library 1886), Boy’s Stor Library (1887), Cricket Library (1888), Log Cabin Library (1889), Nugget Library (1889), Nick Carter Library (1890), Gem Library (1890), Comic Library (1892), Young Sleuth (1892), Frank Reade Library (1892), Bob Brooks Library (1893), Tip Top Library (1896), Diamond Dick Library (1896), New Nick Carter Library (1897), Pluck and Luck (1898), Secret Service (1899), James Boys Weekly (1900).
Were any of these any good? No. They were also not intended as children’s literature, for the most part. Once they became tagged as Y-A/Tweener/Kid’s Stuff, they ran with it. Some of the publications I’ve mentioned are more properly listed as Story Papers (meaning that they were initially newspapers in form), but almost all of them became Dime Novels. My listing is by no means comprehensive—in fact, there is no comprehensive listing. We are really dealing with three separate products, produced in three waves, all of which came to resemble each other and become marketed together.
As a medium of some depth and scope, the Dime Novels essentially croaked after the Civil War. Most of their history is comprised of a literary half-life spent as nostalgia items and/or cheap tweener fiction. It didn’t start out that way.
The first Dime Novels are typical newsprint digests—or more properly stereotypical newsprint digests, since they are the products of the stereotype letterpress industry. (The stereotype was an early method of setting a full page of type for publication.) Take a look at the Old Framer’s Almanac, or any of the almanacs that you find at the drug store. That’s what they looked like. It was an accumulation of eighth bedsheet pages of newsprint, folded in half, center stapled and bound in a thin cardboard “wrapper”. Five newsprint pages was the staple limit, giving you a maximum of 128 pages. Page counts go up in stages of 32. One bedsheet of newspaper equals 32 pages of digest, two equals 64, three 96, four 128. There are no other configurations. These types of publications can be churned out by nearly any newspaper press. Ben Franklin published them. The advent of the steam driven press and the stereotype just made them easier to produce.
Aren’t these magazines of some sort? No. And I’m not splitting hairs here. Magazines are periodicals, like newspapers. They come out at a set interval. Dell publication’s Four Color be damned, they have the same name every issue. They come out more than once a year. That is what a periodical is. These are not periodicals. Dime Novels are also not periodicals. Dime Novels are printed when the publisher wants to make a buck, reprinted to the extent in which they sell and stay on the shelves until they sell or fall apart. They are very similar to the old digest and paperback markets.
They are the precursor of the paperback market, although there is no direct connection in time, place, publishers, writers or audience. Also unlike the paperback market, Dime Novels generally didn’t reprint material which had first shown up in book form. Instead, they reprinted material which first appeared as serials in syndicated newspapers or had been serialized in Story Papers. At the very start, most Dime Novels featured all new material written specifically for the form. Once printed, however, the material never left the Dime Novel system. Instead, it was reprinted and repackaged over and over again. Other almanac publications generally didn’t do that. This was a trait of the Dime Novel industry which only became a problem later on.
There were not too many printing methods available when the industry of digests started. There was the digest, the newspaper and the hard bound book and that was it. The digest field, such as it was, was dominated not so much by want to be magazines as it was by want to be books. Before the advent of the steam press and stereographic type, the actual cost saving between hard bound and digest wasn’t much. The new presses and new layout machine actually dropped the cost of both forms, but widened the margin somewhat. What little advantage the digest had is that you could print up material that no hard bound press would want to touch—with all that implies. They could also be mailed cheaper, an artificial savings that the post office clamped down on in 1901, effectively killing what was left of the digest industry. And we can blame the Dime Novels for that. What golden age the digest may have enjoyed was part of the overall Dime Novel boom itself.
No one is entirely sure who was the first to stick a whole work of long form fiction into a digest. The original novels of the Romantic Era would have swamped the Dime Novel format, which is good in a sweet spot of from 40k to 60k words. This became the American standard for novels thanks largely to the Dime Novel’s popularity. You can almost stop thanking the Dime Novel industry at this point. This new more compressed length is one of only four innovations produced in the long history of the form.(We will go into the other three at length later.) Nor is it clear how many digests were anthologies of short works by various different writers. For some reason those don’t actually track as Dime Novels. By Dime Novel, we are talking about a single long work of fiction published as part of a trademarked series. Everything else is just a digest, fiction content or not. During the Dime Novel era, 1830-1890, about a quarter of all digests were Dime Novels. Unlike Dime Novels, most digests were not reprinted over and over. After the Dime Novel era, the popularity of digests in any form depends exclusively on the scarcity of paper. It’s a dead form unless paper prices are through the roof or paper is being rationed.
The first actual digest labeled as a Dime Novel was the product of one Erastus Beadle. Erastus is the father of the industry, the issuer of the first Dime Novel. In fact, Dime Novel is his literal trademark. Just as only Thermos makes Thermos bottles and everyone else makes vacuum ware, only Beadle produces Dime Novels. Everyone else produces fiction digests at 10 cents which are 128 pages and had best be called something else. Erastus, his brothers, their pal Charles Adams and their former employee George Munroe are really the heart of this industry at the start. That the Beadle & Adams group didn’t go onto greater publishing heights can be attributed to two factors: (1) there were no greater publishing heights to attain at the time and (2) by the time the group hit on Dime Novels, they were all fairly long in the tooth.
Erastus Beadle, like everyone else in digest publishing, was a printer first and a publisher second. Or perhaps all of that was secondary to owning a bookstore. To flash you back to the dawning of the American book publishing industry, the steam press and stereotype had made the technology of printing cheaper and more portable than it had previously been. Almost every bookstore also printed books—or at least housed a fraction of the process. By the time Erastus achieves majority, this technology has spread from its place of import in New York City all the way to Buffalo. Like most people in this trade, Erastus owns a bookstore/tobacco store/card shop and a stereographic foundry plus a book bindery. His foundry is used to set one of the daily papers. He binds other people’s books. He also publishes a pair of Story Papers, one of which was called Children’s Casket (a horrible name to modern eyes, but meaning ‘Toy Box’ in the parlance of the time.) His good Irish mother then proceeds to kick successions of brothers out of her house and into his business. Eventually Erastus gets sick of it and runs away. (A divorce was also involved, losing him the store.) Erastus goes out west to become a real estate speculator and returns to Buffalo after having been transformed into a broke alcoholic. He, his brothers, their wives, his mother, her remaining minor children, Charles Adams (a friend of the brothers) pack shop up and the whole motley Irish mob of them move to New York.
The men folk get jobs in the printing business, pool their cash, open bookstores and start back in the digest business. (Very long story, including everyone except the mother starting competing businesses, made short.) The way the book publishing and digest industry at this point works is that most of the retailers are also publishers. All of the retailers also sell each other’s works, so there really are no secrets. When something is hot, everyone knows it.
Erastus is the hottest guy in the digest business. You just do what he does and you make a good living. Erastus has had a string of hits in the digest sector, starting with bound sheet music of popular songs—his Dime Song Book. This is followed by several other new song series. This is followed by Dime Horse Doctor and various manuals on playing the emerging sport of Base-ball. All of this stuff gets ripped off by other publishers the moment it shows any promise. His big hitter, Dime Tax Law, is the only one that can’t simply be swiped in content or genre. Keeping that and its sister publication National Tax Law up to date requires more investment than just a press and a desire to print. Dime Tax Law itself is a major hit, selling 200K copies and coming out quarterly or whenever new tax news strikes.
Flush with cash, Erastus branches out into other forms—fiction being a favorite of his. (As a publisher it is clearly his first love. He just hasn’t been able to make it work.) He launches a fairly successful hard bound line, specializing in middle brow fiction at the 50 cent level. (Most books cost $2.50.) He launches another pair of Story Papers. He even launches some periodicals in digest form, the literary magazines Dime Dialogues and Speaker. And in 1860 he issued the first Dime Novel.
Did Erastus actually “do” anything here? So it’s a novel in digest form—so what? Just to undercut this further, it was a reprint of a Story Paper serial. But it wasn’t abridged or compressed. The work was just the right size. Finding and commissioning works that would fit his format is his real innovation. The second work, the infamous Seth Jones, was brought to Beadle on spec. Beadle, for his part, did dump a lot of promotion into it. Even before it was a hit, between Dime Novel One and Dime Novel Two, other publishers jumped in. Erastus was that influential. George Munroe, Beadle’s former layout supervisor (who had located his firm at an address Beadle had moved from) was in before the returns on Dime Novel One could be known.
Sometimes being a success means never being alone in what you do. The field became crowded instantly. And it all sold.
Whereas other publishers were contracting with authors for reprint rights of serials to be trimmed, Beadle focused on obtaining strictly new material. He claimed he was looking for works something along the lines of:
Beadle's Dime Novels are good, pure, and reliable; they are exhilarating without being feverishly or morbidly exciting; they are elaborated in drama, disseminating in character, choice in incident, and impressive in denouement; are adapted to all classes, readable at all times, fit for all places. These general features are "representative" ones, and should attract the attention of all persons in pursuit of the best romances in the most available form at the least possible expense.
The short take was: Can you write like James Fennimore Cooper and keep it down to 60K words? If you can, Mr. Beadle will publish you. He will pay you $700.00 on acceptance. There will never be a royalty of any kind and the text, title and perhaps the characters are Mister Beadle’s forever and ever. Except for the part wherein he pays you cash on acceptance, this is something less than the world’s greatest publishing deal. This “one risk” form of acceptance is the second Dime Novel innovation and one which has hung around the longest. It is certainly in keeping with his ‘least possible expense’ motto, coming to a miserable 1 and 1/10th penny a word rate.
Could you get a better or different deal from his competitors? The James Fennimore Cooper thing is compulsory. Never has an entire medium been more held up to the standard of one author’s works than the Dime Novel industry in its first flush. Cooper was a winner. Cooper sells. There is no room for anything that isn’t Cooper. As for the rate, you might get a grand. But the other “one risk” terms remain. No one in this industry has time for royalties or any tricky accounting. 1 and 1/10th cent a word was poor payment, even in the 1800s. Like the similarly confined Lending Library Market much later, much of what they wound up publishing was reprints, abridged gut jobs, and short stories which had been padded out from their previously published form. To be blunt, it kept the literary value of the entire industry fairly low.
It became a fairly big industry, but it was so cut up that few of the players became rich off it. It was a profitable sideline for Beadle, but hardly his main business. Only two firms, both late arrivals, that started in the industry went on to better things. For the most part, it was clusters of booksellers exchanging each other’s wares. The occasional big hit was good for everybody. The snoozers were amortized amongst many outlets. Everything sold… eventually. What growth there was came from the spread of the rails. Every time a rail depot opened, an instantaneous supply of Dime Novels would soon follow.
If there was money to be made in this business, it was in wholesaling. Dime Novels were either ordered via the mails or were in various general store type shops. Newsstand distributorship was rare. The market was instantly mature in New York and grew to maturity quickly in any place rails sprouted to. Then the Civil War hit.
Soldiers on both sides consumed Dime Novels by the dozens. Women in the north consumed them by the dozens. (Abe Lincoln was supposedly a fan.) They were “the” diversion of the war. During the war period, more Dime Novels were printed each year than had existed totally the year before. New titles quadrupled. Nothing like a captive audience to boost production. Content wise, they became even more low brow—even pornographic. (They sold trick cards, loaded dice and porn in their classified ads.) You could blow your nose on paper and sell 60K copies—which is what it seemed some publishers were doing.
Then the war ended. With the war’s end, there was no further need to ever commission another new Dime Novel again. So they didn’t. The industry went into reprint mode. Which is not to say they stopped making new titles, but rather to say that the firms were either reprinting their own titles or were reprinting works which had fallen out of favor in the conventional book market. This is how they got a hold of Horatio Alger—and never let him go.
As early as 1865 the Dime Novels were importing previously published works from England. Again, here Erastmus Beadle led the way. The children’s story paper market in England was far more vibrant than it had been in the United States. And it was an older market. The reprint rights for what had been clapboard novels of the Romantic period were available as was reprint rights for Potter and Dickens and many authors of much lesser reputation. Heck, some of it was free, if you were willing to steal. Sadly, all of this is the direction in which the entire industry went.
Which bring us to our second type of Dime Novel, the Yellowback. Recall that the Dime Novel itself is assembled from eighth pages of newsprint bound into a cardboard wrapper, or cover. A yellowback, an English form imported into the United States, was a quarter page of newsprint, folded and bound. As opposed to having a cardboard cover, the yellowback’s cover was also newsprint, but it was splashed with a chemical four color process. It was kind of like the Sunday funnies, at least on the first page. On the back pages, which are really the reverse of the front two pages, there’s this funny toxic run off stain. It is the stain of these very hazardous chemicals which gives the Yellowback its name.
Initially the Yellowbacks were about 16 pages and opened up like a newspaper. This was all well and good for tightly packed England, but not such a good fit for the American market. Few things travel more poorly via rail than unbound newsprint, which is why the Dime Novels were the way they were. The Yellowbacks, which in England were weeklies, soon became Dime Novels in both size and form. Most American Yellowbacks simply assembled several weeks worth of material and made it a monthly—or more commonly just a number in a Dime Novel series. Again, the industry saw no reason why material, once acquired, ever had to go out of print. Like everything else, the Yellowbacks were reprinted to death.
What did stick from the Yellowback concept was the idea of splashing color, on the wrapper or on the front page or both. All Dime Novels, no matter when they had originated, came to be treated with this color process. Sometimes it was stencil airbrushed on by the retailer. Since having illustrations on the inside seemed to be such a draw, all Dime Novels, no matter when they had been created, soon came to have them. At times these illustrations were quite comical in their randomness. Again, Beadle set the standard by purchasing previously used magazine illustrations and randomly seeding them throughout his back catalog. Although not one of the four trends I mentioned, this randomly illustrated approach was carried over into the medium of pulp magazines and, to some extent, comic books.
The third innovation brought to us via Dime Novels also happened in the wake of the war: They stopped giving an accurate cover date. Cover dates ranged from a few months to three years into the future. Since they really weren’t magazines and were seldom sold as such, one wonders whom these fanciful dates were out to fool.
If anything, they probably should have back dated themselves. Although the reach for a juvenile market through the Yellowbacks was nominally successful, what really kept the Dime Novels on the shelves were wave after wave of Civil War nostalgia. It was one wave after another from 1875 onward. All of those wonderful Dime Novels you enjoyed in camp would always be available—as well as some you only wished you had read.
Even by 1865 this form is being superseded by other magazine types. Only Dime Novels are still in cardboard covered digests. Everything else is going photographic cover stock. And the Dime Novels are not cheap compared to your average newspaper. All that is coming into this market is old material and juvenile material. But that is enough to sustain it. As the soldiers die off, it becomes more and more identified with juvenile materials—until that is all that it is considered.
But didn’t this stuff become old? No. Not to a ten year old. To proceeding generations of ten year olds, it was all new. They did try to keep attracting ten year olds by occasionally updating their offerings, but that was a last ditch effort on the part of a firm which had overplayed a previous trend.
The firm was known as Street & Smith, one of only two firms that went onto bigger things after having started in Dime Novels. It is responsible for the final Dime Novel innovations. Street & Smith is a later arrival only if you consider showing up just after the Civil War late. They do start their history at the start of the decline. With no back material to publish, their focus was on following trends, in the youth market and otherwise. For most of the time they were in Dime Novels, their competition was shoveling out decades old materials. They were the only new producer in the industry for the longest time. That said, they were also the biggest reprinter--but not of their own material. If an old publisher should just vanish, you could count on S&S to grab their material. Nostalgia crazes were like found money to them.
Street & Smith specialized in character magazines—magazines dedicated to the exploits of a continuing character. That was a Dime Novel first. Before Dime Novels, such magazines didn’t exist. When the character magazines started, they were “covering” the exploits of real life outlaws, such as Billy the Kid and the James Brothers gangs. Writing fictional stories about the actions of real life outlaws was dicey on several levels—such as when the estates of such sue you for defamation of character, as Billy the Kid’s did. Street & Smith stuck to lawmen or at least entertainers, bringing under license the person of Buffalo Bill Cody. They also came up with lawmen and other characters who they claimed to be “real”, like Nick Carter. Again, no one had actually done this before. The craft of character management became a science and an industry for Street & Smith. It was out of this new field that the firm built its empire and was able to transcend the Dime Novels.
Buffalo Bill and Nick Carter were huge hits for Street & Smith. The firm had one last hit in Dime Novels with their college hero Frank Merriwell in 1896—the absolute end of the Dime Novel era. Beyond going on for 1000 plus issues itself, spawning a raft of imitators and prompting three spin offs, the character transcended his medium, becoming the subject of an early series of silent movies, landing a syndicated comic strip and eventually leading Street & Smith into an embrace of the coming radio age. It brought the entire Dime Novel field back, reprints and all.
After about 15 years it all died out again. At this point the Dime Novels weren’t really themselves anymore. They all had slick covers and the size was closer to that of a comic book than a digest. At least the new ones were illustrated on every page, similar in layout if not tone to what would be later favored by EC Comics. The rest of the Dime Novels were just old material, some very old, dressed up. Just when you thought the whole thing would die a natural death, a funny thing happened.
Gay 90s nostalgia. In the case of the Dime Novels, it was nostalgia for items which had been selling themselves as nostalgia items since just after the Civil War. Gay 90s nostalgia waves hit in 1910, 1920, 1930 and just before the war. At that point much of the material was owned by third parties, novelty presses or was public domain. It hung around in shops for the longest time.
Avon, the paperback house, was the other firm besides Street & Smith to come out of Dime Novels and go onto other things. Like a number of pulp and novelty houses, they found themselves the inheritors of Dime Novel material. The firm's pulp arm actually started its existence in this final nostalgia wave, printing up facsimile editions of Dime Novels in modern pad bound digest format. Much of the lasts runs of Dime Novel reprints were actually done in photo offset, a leading edge form which would not take real hold until after WWII.
I last saw the Dime Novels in a Chicago “junk shop” called Kars, where they had been apparently sitting in inventory since the late 1930s or so. By the time Street & Smith converted all of their titles to pulps, the pulp format was well established. Interest in the production of Dime Novels waned sharply with the onset of WWII. At that point, even as a nostalgia buy, they had grown stale.
Next: News From the World of Pulps and Magazines
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