What Ever Happened to the Romantic Flyer? (Pulp History)

The Romantic Flyer (Pulp Fiction Vehicle)

Pulp Fiction has had a number of vehicles. Some of these vehicles have gathered more interest than others. With some formats, the objects themselves have gained a following as collectible items. We have seen this mostly with comic books, pulp magazines and the particularly offensive “Sweats”. By contrast, other formats are not much celebrated or covered, either  because they were physically unattractive, they contained light romantic prose to the exclusion of anything else or simply because no person living has a direct recollection of them. Other vehicles have dropped off the historical radar because there are next to no physical examples remaining. We know these vehicles primarily through historical allusion. For example, we know the Police Gazette published on pink paper to distinguish itself from other scandal rags, but we have scant record of any other scandal rag. For several of the above reasons, the once fairly widespread Romantic Flyer has passed into dust without a single historical jot or dash noted anywhere.

Romantic Flyers were sort of a big deal, the primary source of literary entertainment for an entire era of American women. Half past rural free delivery, every house with a wife had one. They were contemporaries of the Wards and Sears catalogs. In effect, they were competitors of the catalogs. Their purpose was to provide advertising access for lesser mail order operators. Like the catalogs, they spread with the rails. Whereas the Sears catalog had snappy copy  and litho pictures to keep one interested in the pitch, the Romantic Flyer drew female eyes with  light prose in the mostly Romance genre. What makes the Romantic Flyer interesting is that it was the first advertising supported written fiction medium. Moreover, it was a long-lived medium, tracing its history from the start of the wire services through to the 1930s.

To be clear, the Romantic Flyer is a text publication featuring Romance genre fiction in the form of novellas and short stories. They are not typically illustrated. The stories are bracketed and bifurcated by advertising appeals, mostly done newspaper classified style. Other than having a desire to reach female consumers, characterizing the advertisers supporting the medium is difficult. Most ads were direct buy appeals for manufactured items. The advertiser was seeking a broad pull—his product was either not available in certain regions  or may simply have had limited demand. To go further would be to disparage the advertisers. The medium survived because it provided cheap, targeted access to potential buyers.

Romantic Flyers are often dismissed as being Story Papers. Story Papers are tabloid newspapers which have something other than the news as their primary focus. These are the earliest forms of magazines. And quite a few Romantic Flyers were Story Papers, inasmuch as many were tabloid newspaper-like things. From a popular fiction perspective, there are only four notable  types of Story Paper:

     The Children’s Weekly: some went head to head with the dime novels, whereas other mutated into dime novels. One children’s weekly, the Golden Argosy, mutated into the first pulp magazine.

·         The Slinger: a bar tabloid, chock full of naughty pictures, handyman hints and attempts at off color humor. Most had some fiction content, although it wasn’t the drawing feature.

·         The Scandal Rag: really a Slinger with a crime focus. Weirdly none of our current scandal rags are directly descended from these publications. In their original form they did not cover celebrities. Considered fiction magazines only because most of the Indian tortures, white slave auctions and acts of mutilation sodomy incest depicted in their pages simply never happened.

·         
The Bookseller: put out by hard cover novel publishing houses, usually filled with materials culled from snips of the latest offerings. 

The Romantic Flyer does not fit into any of the above categories. As far as fiction presented is concerned, it shares some resemblance to the Bookseller. By contrast, the Romantic Flyer was not out to sell books. If they are sharing material with Bookseller type papers, there is a good chance that what appeared in the Romantic Flyer was on its second run. But I don’t think they ran much of the same material. The editorial* content of the Romantic Flyer was sourced far differently than the Bookseller. Moreover, Romantic Flyers were not bound by a specific format. They were just as likely to be in digest or dime novel form as in tabloid. As opposed to a vehicle type, we are talking about a business model and a set presentation.

Romantic Flyers constitute their own label for several reasons. They all came to lead with fiction. Its stock and trade was romance labeled as Romance. If anything, they contributed to the identification of expectations that the audience has in works labeled as such. It could be argued that this expectation already existed, but the Romantic Flyers were amongst the first group of periodicals to place it so front and center in the modern sense. Even as late as the dime novel period (Civil War through WWI) any non classical work of fiction was designated as Romance. The Romantic Flyers are peddling what we today call Romance, and in that sense they were cutting edge for their time.

This is not to say that they comprised all that is Romance today. I say this with the caveat that all I have to go by is a general familiarity with the type of material from which stories appearing in the Romantic Flyer may have been drawn. If anyone has any first hand knowledge of the nuance of their content, I haven’t been able to find it. My guess is that it wass follow the Jane Austen Bronte Sisters leader stuff,  presenting romance as romance was at the time.  It wasn’t set up for innovation. Other than shoveling Romance in a particularly women-oriented form, the Romantic Flyer is not interested in moving the ball. In fact, they had very little control over their editorial content.

Romantic Flyers were the products of wire services.  The entire non advertising content of the Romantic Flyer was culled from pieces commissioned by the various newspaper content services.  Once a man by the name of Hearst decided that the daily paper should contain more than news, wire services of various sorts sprouted up to help his competitors keep pace with this press baron’s offerings.** Wire services provided ready made features for use in local newspapers. Today the services are largely remembered as distributors of comic strips, columnists and crossword puzzles, but there was a time when the services pushed out a wide variety of soft features, including fiction. And each service was a smorgasbord of the stuff, making available more material than could ever be used by a single newspaper in a day. And most local newspapers subscribed to all of the services.

One imagines the Romantic Flyer got its start as a one off business for newspapers. In major cities newspapers with an evening edition would pad out their wares with wire service soft features—something suitable for non serious evening reading. It’s “thumb sucker” text, taking up a place where real news would be if there was any. (Or, as Hearst viewed it, a reason to pick up the paper regardless of the flow of the news.) At the time romantic shorts and even serialized novels  were common in many major dailies. In other places with less word hole, the features were not run at all—or may have been amalgamated into the first Romantic Flyers.

More likely, the Romantic Flyer was advertising driven from the start. Having ready made and relatively cheap content available from the wire services simply makes the concept possible. The base idea is to package advertisers who wish to reach homemakers. That the majority of them came to feature Romance in the lead is probably a matter of trial and error. Once the first one worked, others copied it.

Romantic Flyers are not known to have been sold on newsstands to any extent. Instead most took the form of newspaper inserts, store giveaways or free subscriptions. Or junk mail. Romantic Flyers were published by advertising agencies and newspapers. All of the major chains came to have a version of these sections and there seems to have been a fad in advertising agencies putting such things together. They came in the mail, were stuffed into the Sunday (or Thursday) paper or just appeared in bags handed out by merchants.

The format seemed to work, although its origination is hard to pin down. There’s no mention of them before the Civil War and really no allusions to their existence prior to the Gay 90s. My thinking is that they began as a rural phenomena and then spread. By the Gay 90s they’re common and they’re everywhere. These sections never had a formal industry name that I can find. They are often alluded to as “a thing my mother got from the butcher” or “that lady’s insert”. There are also stray references to the things simply being thrown on the doorstep. Whether the trend impacted the wire service’s demand to commission romantic fiction is not known, but there seems to have been a steady progression of material into the system throughout the Romantic Flyer’s lifespan.

There is no flagship Romantic Flyer and they are somewhat slapdash affairs. Most had variable covers. As a newspaper insert, the first two and last two pages of the publication would be customized, containing the paper’s name and advertising generated by  the paper carrying it. This wrapped interior content which might be parading under any number of names as inserts in other papers. Similarly, as a giveaway, the local dry goods merchant may have his name on the cover but what all of this is wrapping is probably not all that exclusive. Your local butcher is no more the publisher than your local newspaper is. In exchange for the distribution of the inner ad material, the packager has offered his two most prime pieces of promotion real estate. This is not an uncommon formula.

They were cheaply produced and flimsy, too—which is why we have so little in the way of existing examples. It’s junk mail. It’s little booklets. It’s thin tabloids with rubber stamped hardware logos on the covers. This isn’t something one normally saves. Most of what we know of them comes from references in other mediums.

As with any giveaway, it’s hard to tell what their readership actually was. Or how many of them there  were. People who remembered them enough to mention them said they were “always around the house”.  Few of the Romantic Flyers were frequent or even published at regular intervals. Some of them may have been tied to specific seasons, but it seems most were driven by advertising demand more than anything else. Given their erratic nature, few of them serialized stories. The typical content seems to have been a novella and a few shorts of 2500 words or less.

Retailers liked the idea so much that many large department stores went into the magazine business, copying the Romantic Flyer’s format and adding in slick pages. This is where the modern women’s magazine came from. Most women’s magazines started as Romance fiction vehicles with some slick advertising and pictures thrown in. *** Weirdly the advent of women’s magazines doesn’t seem to have dented the prevalence of Romantic Flyers. In the end, Romantic Flyers were for small scale advertisers and could keep pace by being essentially free to the reader.

What I think killed the Romantic Flyer was the same thing that killed quite a few magazines and newspapers: the rise of radio. Radio became common during the 1930s and was the medium people spent the most time with by the 1940s. This forced the wire services to start cutting down on their offerings. By the start of the 40s they were no longer pumping prose fiction in any form, so there was nothing for the Romantic Flyers to cut and paste.

The idea of packing features around advertising meant for a target market lives on, but the little Romantic Flyers dried up and disappeared in fairly short order. At that point the audience for their material was fairly well established.

What I can say for sure is that the appetite for even material as staid as what the Romantic Flyers provided never waned. If anything, the genre of Romance merely broadened once women were paying the freight for their reading material. As a freebie, the Romantic Flyer was allowed into the home because it didn’t cost the bread-winner anything (other than to suffer the little lady sticking her nose into drivel for a period of time.) Once the women’s movement started to pick up steam, the idea of a woman spending money on her own entertainment became less of a taboo. So besides losing its material, the Romantic Flyer may have also been steadily losing audience appeal. By the time the Flappers showed up, the Romantic Flyer was considered fuddy duddy stuff. The Flappers themselves went for pulps. And there never was any known attempt to modernize or revive the Romantic Flyer form once it vanished.

Dropping dead concurrently with the Romantic Flyer were the slick sections of women’s fiction that were also common in newspapers. One of the reasons that I am hesitant about covering pulp fiction exclusively via formats is that what is presented in one type of vehicle is often the exact same content

as another vehicle only on different paper with a different presentation. There was a slick paper version of the Romantic Flyer, which catered to  fashion and furniture retailers. It’s the same stuff as the Romantic Flyer with different ads. Their vanishing act can be perhaps be attributed to Radio’s rise also, but I think there may have been other factors at play.

To touch on their content, the Romantic Flyers and their slick evil twins and the Romance offered by the Booksellers and the early women’s magazines were all of a rather hide bound type. These are family oriented melodramas with set themes, toned down so as  to not offend anyone. More importantly, they are not supposed to reflect badly on the advertisers. For spice, there’s moments of moral uplift, dispensed Campbell’s Soup style in crescendo proportions. They read something like the old Hallmark Hall of Fame or Afterschool Special television movies. Calling it  imitations of Austen and the Brontes is somewhat incorrect. It was more imitative of the material which made Austen and the Brontes so stand out. And by the time the Romantic Flyers were presenting it, the entire genre was plenty threadbare.

And it wasn’t just the Romantic Flyers which were running this stuff. Hardbound novels of the time were no better. Prior to the release of Gone With The Wind, the genre was simply stuck in a rut.***** What the Romantic Flyers did was to advance the genre as a set thing, an identifiable product with parameters and an audience. It should also be said that writers are whores. There was no distinction in style or quality in what was run in hardbound, slick or wire service romantic fiction. It’s the same writers. It’s the same stuff. Historians refer to this branch of Romance as Victorian or Purple Prose. By the time the Romantic Flyers are giving this stuff its airing, the stuff is starting to lose traction.

Three trends in Romance began to collapse the appeal of the Purple Prose presentation. Two of them came from the Pulp magazines and one from the new medium of radio. In order of their appearance, these were:

1. True Confessions: This got its start in the women’s hygiene section of a physical fitness magazine and soon spread to dozens of pulp magazines. In its best light, it illuminates personal issues one might be embarrassed to speak of. In its worst light, it is like a sinner’s confession at a camp revival.
2. Flapper Fiction: Jazz Age backlash against the asexual (or sex neutral) preachings of the suffragettes. Not just honest about sex—graphic, casual and thrill seeking.

Note: True Confessions itself became the longest lasting subset in the Pulp magazine format. Between it and Flapper Fiction, hundreds of pulp magazine titles were launched. In time, however, the average Romance pulp came to be a mix of these two subsets along with Purple Prose. Those women’s slick magazines that continued to handle Romance fiction really weren’t any different. (The slicks paid better and thus got first crack at the material.) By 1920 the Pulps essentially owned Romance.

The problem with True Confessions and Flapper Fiction is that it is somewhat offensive. It is not at all suitable for the Romantic Flyer nor any advertising vehicle. The new mix was, however, very popular—hence the fleets of Romance titles plying the genres which crammed the newsstands between 1917 and 1960. As for the women’s slicks which came to adopt it, they were simply following the leader. A trend away from hygienic moral uplift and towards giving the ladies what they wanted is what led to the creation of…

3. The Soap Opera: Pretext to moral uplift be damned, draw an audience of homemakers and sell them soap. Theme wise, soap operas borrowed heavily from True Confessions while maintaining some of the Purple Prose character types and narrative style. It’s big innovation was that the story never ended. Plot arcs in various stages of beginning, middle and ending kept the ladies coming back daily or weekly for their fix. And like the Romantic Flyers, it was essentially free.

What exactly did the Romantic Flyer in is unknown. They went from ubiquitous in 1890 to utter non existence by 1935. That they were something of a recycle medium is probably why they don’t merit much study. With so few remaining copies existent, it is hard to do much more in the way of explaining their particular bent to the craft. Even the field of wire service Romance fiction remains obscure, although it was at one time what entire generations of women lost themselves in. Neglecting the field and its history seems like something of an injustice.

*I use the term “Editorial” very loosely here. What’s driving the process is the need to fit content in around advertising. The content fits the space the advertising allows for. They’re going to put in just enough content to make the publication not seem like just an advertising flyer. The “editor” of a Romantic Flyer is picking his offerings from stories which have been offered for publication to any subscriber of the wire services. Most of these stories will be running concurrently elsewhere.

** Very long story made very short. The wire services pre date William Randolph Hearst by decades. Wire services spread with the rails and started distributing copy as early as the 1850s, before the Civil War. Hearst didn’t show up until 1895. And the wire services were pushing out soft features well before Hearst was even born. But Hearst did become the reason for most of the wire services being in existence and was behind their drive to produce so much ready for press non news content.

*** Although all of the original women’s magazines were started by stores, most of them became independent entities shortly afterward. Many of them had origins in being the spring issue of the store’s general catalog, with a few puff pieces thrown in. It was only after most of them became autonomous that they sought copy straying from simple sales boosterism. The Romantic Flyers, being advertising vehicles themselves, made ready models.  

**** Even Jane Austen wasn’t all that popular in the United States until the 1940s. That women’s romance didn’t have a distinguishing sales pull was largely due to the material. Gone With the Wind (1936) actually follows the advents of the Sex Novel, True Confessions and Flapper Fiction. Which is to say that the stuff appearing in the Romantic Flyers was extremely tame and same. The modern Romance influences, outside of Austen, are Peyton Place, Gone With the Wind, Flapper Fiction and True Confessions. Other than the label “Romance” what is being peddled in the Romantic Flyers might not seem to be romance at all to modern eyes.

A Final Note: Changes in the way wire services licensed copy may have also put a dent into the production of Romantic Flyers. Initially the wire services didn’t care how much of their copy a set publisher used nor how many types of ways they cut it up. If you want to run the romance serial in the food section, go right ahead. You don’t want to run it at all, you don’t have to. The wire services are an all you can eat buffet. Take as much or as little as you want. Due to abuses of this agreement, the wire services and their kin the newspaper syndicates (at times synonyms, at times not) started to get sticky about what a publisher could do with the offered material.

The best historical example is the Yellow Kid. The Yellow Kid is a comic strip. Newspapers who had contracted for the right to run the Yellow Kid in their pages also began using the Yellow Kid on cigarette papers, on liquor bottle labels and in magazines made up of previously published strips. The wire service which owned the Yellow Kid at that point decided to clamp down on what the license to print it actually meant.  And that clamping down process was ongoing. If the producers of the Romantic Flyers were being hit with a separate syndication fee, it would have probably killed their margin. With no profit, there’s no reason to do it.