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Judging Books by Their Covers: Format, the Implied Reader, and the ‘Degeneration’ of the Dime Novel

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SOURCE: “Judging Books by Their Covers: Format, the Implied Reader, and the ‘Degeneration’ of the Dime Novel,” in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture, Vol. 12, No. 3, September, 1998, pp. 247-63.

[In the essay below, Erickson argues that the transformation of the distribution and packaging of dime novels—rather than fundamental changes in the content of the stories—led to their decline.]

[The Beadle publications] are without exception unobjectionable morally, whatever fault be found with their literary style and composition. They do not even obscurely pander to vice or excite the passions.

—William Everett, 1864 (qtd. in Nye 203)

The dreadful damage wrought to-day in every city, town, and village of these United States by the horrible and hideous stuff set weekly before the boys and girls of America by the villainous sheets which pander greedily and viciously to the natural taste of young readers for excitement, the irreparable wrong done by these vile publications, is hidden from no one.

—Brander Matthews, 1883 (qtd. in Denning 9)

The saffron-backed Dime Novels of the late Mr. Beadle, ill-famed among the ignorant who are unaware of their ultra-Puritan purity, … began to appear in the early years of the Civil War; and when I was a boy in a dismal boarding school at Sing Sing, in the winters of 1861-1863, I reveled in their thrilling and innocuous record of innocent and imminent danger.

—Brander Matthews, 1923 (qtd. in Denning 9)

The above quotes, from prominent arbiters of nineteenth-century American taste, illustrate the drastically fluctuating fortunes of the signature popular fiction phenomenon of the century, the dime novel. The New York firm of Beadle and Adams published the first dime novel, Malaeska; the Indian Wife of the White Hunter by Mrs. Ann Stephens in June, 1860. In October of that year, Beadle's first rival in the ten-cent fiction series field began publication. By 1864, the prestigious North American Review, having taken notice of these short books with their salmon-colored paper covers, stated that over five million Beadle and Adams dime novels were in circulation, and by the late 1870s, hundreds of competing cheap fiction series flooded the market. Yet by 1896 the Beadle firm had disappeared, and their main competitor, George Munro, had died, leaving behind an estate of $10 million. The last true dime novel series, Street and Smith's “New Buffalo Bill Weekly,” stopped publication in 1912. In 1922, examples from a collection of 1400 Western dime novels donated to the New York Public Library were put on display to illustrate the history of the dead genre.

Such books were especially well-suited to being put on display, for the dime novel industry was a pioneer in many aspects of book production and design: including the use of cover illustrations and colored pictures, the variation in size of different series, and the production of books to be sold at newsstands. These innovations played a crucial role in the creation of a “literary marketplace,” the entrance of books into the burgeoning consumer culture of late-nineteenth-century America. As Russel Nye has written, “Beadle and Adams's contribution to publishing was one of merchandising, not content. They organized production, standardized the product, and did some shrewd guessing about the nature and extent of the market” (201). Thus the dime novel can be situated within the larger context of the literary market in nineteenth-century America, which saw the creation of different types of textual presentation, such as different styles of binding and illustration, that could be applied to the same texts in order to reach different segments of the market, strategies with which any contemporary book buyer will be abundantly familiar. Like almost all other consumer goods, due to changes in population patterns, improvements in transportation, and the development of new retail outlets, books were made available to the American public in a multitude of new ways in the years after the Civil War.

Such changes in format and distribution, however, were not viewed as morally neutral by many cultural critics. Increasing concerns about the character of the urban street and its denizens made newsstands suspect, and the popularity of publications such as the Police Gazette heightened the attention paid by at least some concerned citizens to the physical appearance of reading materials, just as the signature bindings of “quality” fiction houses such as Ticknor and Fields became automatic signifiers of acceptability. As the tireless reformer Anthony Comstock noted, “We assimilate what we read. The pages of printed matter become our companions” (ix). This vision of the connection between books as material objects and their moral impact fed logically into Comstock's attacks in the 1880s on dime novels. Ever concerned with what people consume and where they do it, Comstock was aware of the combined attractions of the format and price of these novels, and stridently condemned these “series of new snares of fascinating construction, small and tempting in price” (21).

Comstock did not separate his assault on what the books looked like from what the books said, despite the fact that many of the stories published in the nickel broadsheets he so despised had been published earlier in family magazines or more traditional “dime novels.” The generally accepted narrative of the decline and disappearance of the dime novel is one of gradual degradation, a descent into sensationalism provoked by increased competition from other media, until the dime novel, a decadent parody of its former greatness, breathed its last. But this account ignores the extent of the practices of textual recycling that went on within the industry; the same novels were reprinted again and again, often with different titles and in different formats. Since the rise of the dime novel was not due to an innovation in textual content—Mrs. Stephens's Malaeska had initially been published in the Ladies' Home Companion in 1839—but to innovations in format and distribution, it is possible that the decline in the reputation of the genre was caused, at least in part, by changes in packaging and distribution, and the changes in readership which they implied, rather than by changes in the texts themselves.

Using editions of two dime novels—Stella Delorme; or, the Comanche's Dream and Old Nick of the Swamp—by Ned Buntline, one of the genre's most famous practitioners, each published first in the 1860s and then reprinted 40 years later, this article will examine the physical changes in these books as books, as well as implied changes in distribution and readership, to argue that the shift in the cultural perception of the dime novel was not due solely to a cheapening of their stories. Format and distribution—what books look like and how readers get them—assist in both constructing and instructing an audience. Readers take cues not just from the text, but from its physical appearance and from the environment in which it is acquired. Likewise, non-readers of texts often take cues on how to evaluate texts from what books look like and from whom they perceive the intended readership to be. Everett Williams and Brander Matthews made the statements at the beginning of this article, generally speaking, about the same texts, but not about the same books. This shift in the views held by representatives of “high” culture is in large part, I argue, a response to the readership of the texts, which is in turn constructed (and engendered) by the format of the novels and the ways in which they were sold and distributed. Thus, we can see, as D. F. McKenzie and other scholars in the expanding field of the “history of the book” have pointed out, the importance of the physical reality of books in creating their meaning, at times independent of the words which their pages bear.1

The stories in these Ned Buntline dime novels did not become any more sensational or offensive over 40 years of recycling, although their references to the Texas Revolution and wild Comanches probably became less familiar. What changed for these books, as for almost all printed materials in the nineteenth century, was how they were published, how much they cost, where they were purchased, and, most importantly, the readers who were constructed by and inferred from these three elements. Thus, these examples of dime novel Westerns bear out McKenzie's claim that, “Meanings are not therefore inherent but are constructed by successive interpretative acts by those who write, design, and print books and by those who buy and read them” (18). Yet to McKenzie's crucial analysis of the status of the “text as an unstable physical form” can be added an examination of how the physical form of books is read by people (such as cultural critics or concerned parents) who don’t read the books, the cultural signals emitted by specific formats, and the extent to which texts remain stable (although not in meaning) while the format is altered. As McKenzie notes, “every book tells a story quite apart from that recounted by its text,” but, as the changing responses to the dime novel show, that story is not told only to the readers of the text (8).

Ned Buntline was one of nineteenth-century America's more picaresque figures. After a stint in the Navy and a journalistic career which brought him mixed success, Buntline became a star of the popular fiction industry with the 1848 publication of The Mysteries and Miseries of New York. Following a period of political involvement in the early 1850s, when he was instrumental in founding the nativist Know-Nothing Party, Buntline signed a contract with a story paper, The New York Mercury, in 1858 which would eventually lead him to fame as a dime novelist and, ultimately, as the “discoverer” of Buffalo Bill Cody. Although Buntline got his start in fiction writing sea stories, he quickly adapted his skills to the changing demands of the market, and began producing Westerns, the genre with which he is today most often identified. Two of Buntline's western-themed novels that were recycled by the dime novel industry were Stella Delorme; or, the Comanche's Dream and Old Nick of the Swamp, which both draw on the same fragments of central Texas history for their plots. Stella Delorme first appeared in book form in 1860, published by Frederic A. Brady (it appeared in serial form in The New York Mercury in 1859). The example I was able to examine (in the Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin) no longer has its original cover (nor any of the ads that may have been included), but it most likely had a cheap board cover and sold for 25 cents. It was slightly larger than a typical dime novel, had 72 pages, and contained five illustrations. The story takes place during the Texas Republic, when a young Comanche chief, Lagona, has a vision of a beautiful white girl about to be killed by Lipan Apaches. He rescues the girl, who turns out to be Stella Delorme, daughter of a wealthy Texas planter. Stella is rescued several times by Lagona, who demands her hand in marriage, but is refused by her father and the head of the local Texas Rangers, Major Ben McCullough. After attempting to take Stella from her home by force, Lagona asks Mr. Delorme to take him in, educate him, and teach him the ways of the white man. After his education, Lagona leaves the Delormes, only to return with a gang of Galveston criminals, and kidnap poor Stella once again. She is rescued from the Comanches by Major McCullough, only to be recaptured by Lagona yet again. At the end, Lagona realizes that the woman he loves will never love him and returns her, unharmed, to her father before killing himself, and Stella is married to her white fiancé.

Old Nick of the Swamp; or, The Bravo's Vengeance was first published in 1868 as No. 100 in George Munro & Co.'s “Munro's Ten Cent Novels” series. The title page states that the story is “By an Old Hunter,” and Buntline's name appears nowhere on the book; given Buntline's marketability, this implies that he most likely was officially under contract to another firm at the time and wrote the novel for Munro on the side. This novel is a typical example of the early dime novel: 96 pages long, covered in pale orange paper, in the “traditional” dime novel size (6.25″ × 4″). The cover bears the series name, the title, and an illustration of an Indian with a tomahawk seemingly growing out of the ground behind a grizzled backwoodsman, evidently Old Nick, bearing a rifle. … The incident in the illustration does not take place anywhere in the novel, but it did allow for the inclusion of both an Indian and a trapper as well as their weapons of choice.

The plot of Old Nick is fairly similar to that of Stella Delorme. Set during the Texas Revolution, the novel contains more scenes of graphic violence than did Stella, and the wartime setting offers many more opportunities to insult and kill Mexicans, who are always “greasers” or “yaller-bellies.” Ben Long, a frontier scout, and Adrian Leland, known as “The Bravo,” visit their friend Old Nick, a hermit backwoodsman who lives in the middle of a swamp in central Texas. While visiting, they are told that Inez Montero, the daughter of a prominent Texas merchant, has been kidnapped by raiding Comanches with the aid of Juan Fernandez, Señor Montero's jealous Mexican clerk. With the help of the Lipan Apaches, the only friendly Indians in Texas, the Bravo, Ben, and Old Nick track the Comanches, steal Inez from the middle of the camp, and flee toward home. They are forced to take refuge in an abandoned farmstead, and the Comanches, by this time joined by Mexicans, lay siege to the farm. Old Nick, reprising Davy Crockett's role at the Alamo, leaves for San Antonio to get help, which arrives just in time in the form of Captain Jack Hays and his Texas Rangers. A general slaughter commences, Juan Fernandez is found hiding on the field of battle behind a dead horse, Texas prevails, and the Bravo and Inez are married.

Although Erastus Beadle claimed that his strategy for dealing with rivals who published trashier novels was to “kill a few more Indians than we used to,” both of these novels were republished exactly, without a single additional Indian being killed (qtd. in Pearson 99). Stella Delorme, under various titles, was published five times by Beadle and Adams, first in the “American Tales” series in 1869, then in 1874 as one of the early issues of “Frank Starr's American Novels” after the series switched to a slightly larger format. This series, in 1874, also introduced “illuminated covers” to the market. The announcement accompanying this change in the series' format claimed that the new format offered, “A Twenty-five cent book for ten cents! … [the series] will embrace a considerable number of novels hitherto not accessible to readers, or only to be had in more expensive shape” (qtd. in Johannsen 1: 154-56). Thus, the Beadle firm concealed the extent to which the texts in the series were not only recycled, but recycled from other cheap-fiction series in the Beadle catalog. The novel was released again in 1877 as No. 23 in “Starr's New York Library”;2 the price for novels in all of these various formats was ten cents. Stella was reissued yet again as No. 1038 in “Beadle's Dime Library” in July, 1900 (the copy examined for this paper), after Beadle and Adams had been taken over by M. J. Ivers. All of these various editions were identical textually, and were in fact printed from the same stereotype plates.3

Since other dime novel publishers have not received as much scholarly attention as has Beadle and Adams, it is impossible to say how many times, if any, Old Nick of the Swamp was republished by Munro. The 1908 edition was issued by M. J. Ivers in the “Beadle's Frontier Library” series, a series name that was never used by Beadle and which included many novels, such as Old Nick, which Beadle never published. This edition was printed on very cheap wood-pulp paper, stapled instead of sewn, with the cover glued on—a clear example of cutting corners in production in order to keep costs down. The primary differences are the title page, of course, which bears the new publisher's information but also carries Buntline's name as the author, and the cover, which is a garishly colored illustration (a style introduced in 1895) of an Indian on horseback who has just been shot. Another crucial difference is in price—the 1868 edition sold for a dime, while the 1908 edition sold for a nickel, which in the early twentieth century evidently did not generate enough revenue, as the Ivers firm went out of business later that year.

These two novels by Ned Buntline provide us with examples of dime novels that were recycled, not merely having their texts reprinted, but being reprinted from the identical stereotype plates. So why is the standard account of the dime novel Western, even according to the most astute students of the genre, one of degeneration? Writing of dime novel heroines, Henry Nash Smith wrote that these characters “took a distinct turn for the worse, no doubt corrupted by the general increase of sensationalism,” and that “these changes in the characters reveal a progressive deterioration in the Western story as a genre” (Smith 115, 119). Edmund Pearson writes that Munro's competition forced Beadle to “cheapen the tone of his own books and deal more or less in blood and thunder” (Pearson 85-86). Even the encyclopedic Albert Johannsen writes, “With the introduction of the broadleaves, the type of story gradually changed and deteriorated …” (Johannsen 1:59). There is no question that some dime novel series did grow more sensational with time, and the introduction of new genres, especially the urban detective stories that roared onto the scene in the 1880s, might have allowed for the inclusion of more salacious material. What is striking about the products of an industry that produced stories in such profusion is not how much they changed but how little. The imperative to save money by reissuing the same story in different forms under different titles seems to have at least balanced, if not outweighed, the desire to keep up with the Joneses by spicing up the stories.

As these two novels suggest, even if the stories were newly-written, dime novel authors worked so quickly and according to such established formulae that different stories by the same author cannot help but closely resemble each other. Buntline wrote these two stories almost ten years apart: Stella Delorme before dime novels as such even existed, and Old Nick well into the era of fierce competition for the dime novel audience, when standards were supposed to be slipping. Yet save for a slight increase in violence in the later story, the two are almost identical, and the later novel contains more moralizing and less cursing. These similarities should not be surprising in a genre for which the conditions of production have often been compared to automatic writing, a comparison that seems apt if we are to believe Buntline's claim that he once wrote a 610-page novel in 62 hours. The various reprints of these novels roughly correspond with the dates of the three quotations from Williams and Matthews at the beginning of this article, yet we can see that at least in these two instances, the texts printed in 1877, 1900, and 1908 do not differ at all from their 1860 or 1868 predecessors. The differences in these responses to dime novels at these times can be attributed to a complex nexus of factors including the format in which they appeared, how they were distributed, how they promoted themselves, and who read them.

In answer to the question “Who read these dime novels?” Johannsen answers: “We ourselves read them. … But we were in good company, for they were also read by bankers and bootblacks, clergymen and clerks … in fact by almost everyone except schoolma’ams, pedants, and the illiterate” (Johannsen 1:9). Indeed, the readership that is implied and, I would argue, constructed by the advertisements in the early Beadle publications supports this claim. An ad on the inside cover of the 1868 Old Nick for the next number, The Gamecock of the Santee, states that, “The novel is recommended to every class of readers, and they will find it both interesting and amusing.” In 1863, in response to criticism of their products on moral grounds, Beadle and Adams ran an ad listing the merits of their dime novels. Two items from the list are:

5. Beadle's Dime Novels are particularly adapted to the Houses and Firesides of America, and may safely be placed in the hands of young as well as old.


6. Beadle's Dime Novels are good, pure, and reliable. … [They] are adapted to all classes, readable at all times, fit for all places. (qtd. in Johannsen 1: 45-46)

This appeal to the entire family is also clear in the other kinds of publications advertised in the early dime novels. The back cover of the 1868 Munro Old Nick lists dime novels for sale, as well as song books and French and German grammars. Beadle and Adams included similar books in their lists, as well as books of dialogues, letter-writers, the “Dime Elocutionist,” the “Housewife's Manual,” “Beadle's Base-ball Player” and the “Dime National Tax Law.” In contrast, the 1900 Stella Delorme contains six pages of ads, almost entirely for other dime novel or adventure series, all aimed at young readers. The 1908 Old Nick, produced in the last days of the Ivers firm, contains sloppily produced ads for a book of “Standard Dialogues for Young Folks,” “Beadle's Frontier Series,” and “Beadle's Boys Library.”

The readership of dime novels was implied in other ways as well. As more forms of inexpensive reading material came on the market, publishers understandably began to target publications for specific audiences. While the early story papers and dime novels had been targeted at a broad readership, as the advertisements mentioned above illustrate, in the 1870s various series began to be associated with specific readers. In 1877, several months after Beadle and Adams published the first number of the “Dime Library,” a series of reprints of “quality” literature that aimed for the adult market, they also began “Beadle's Half-Dime Library” which was the first series targeted specifically to boys, although many of its numbers appeared in other series that were not “boys” series. That same year Beadle introduced the “Fireside Library,” which consisted mostly of romances and seems to have been intended for girls. The fact that both series cost a nickel, instead of a dime, shows that publishers such as Beadle and Adams were aware that juveniles and working-class readers made up a large part of their readership and were trying to make their books more accessible to people with little disposable income. W. H. Bishop, writing in the Atlantic in 1879, expressed the predominant view of dime novels at the time, saying that they were “written almost exclusively for the use of the lower classes of society.” He described the traffic at an urban newsstand on publication day, saying that “a middle-aged woman … a shop girl … [and] a servant” stopped by to buy dime novels, “but with them, before them, and after them come boys. … The most ardent class of patron … are boys” (qtd. in Denning 29-30).

It may be no coincidence that in the 1870s, when the bulk of readership was considered to consist of boys, and when advertising for them became more directly focused on attracting boys as consumers, dime novels began to be seen as dangerous influences on young people. As soon as they came to be seen as age-specific reading material, instead of shared family pleasures, these books could be used to explain the perennially awful behavior of children. The indefatigable Anthony Comstock wrote, in Traps for the Young, that a young man he arrested for obscenity in Massachusetts maintained his cool up to the moment of the discovery of a stack of nickel weeklies in his room: “When these were discovered, he … said with great feeling, ‘There! that’s what has cursed me! That has brought me to this!’” (28-29). At the time, story papers were at the height of their popularity and circulated to hundreds of thousands of American homes. They were almost identical in format to the broadsheet dime novels, but contained a wide variety of stories, making them the reading material of choice for families who could only afford one periodical. The crucial differences from the broadsheet dime novels, however, were that the story papers were delivered into the home instead of bought at newsstands, and were marketed to the entire family instead of to boys. The fact that these weekly story papers contained material almost identical to the adventure tales appearing in the dime novels makes the questions of distribution and readership crucial to understanding how dime novels were perceived.

The answer to the question “Who read these dime novels?” seems to be that everyone read them, but that they were associated with young readers, especially boys; as Comstock claimed, “Boys read these stories almost incessantly after once a taste is acquired” (24). A more difficult question to answer, and one that is much less often asked, is how did the boys get them? The early dime novels appear to have been sent largely through the mail. Since the first American postal laws in 1792, postal rates were structured to allow for the easy and inexpensive access of all Americans to information that was deemed essential to the functioning of a democracy. This, of course, meant newspapers, while books were seen less as conveyors of information or vessels of national culture than as items of merchandise.4 Newspapers were favored to such an extent—in the early 19th century, postage on a newspaper going an unlimited distance was 1.5 cents, while postage on a one-page letter going over 450 miles was 25 cents—that people began to write letters in the margin space in newspapers to save money (Fuller 111). Richard Kielbowicz makes the valuable distinction between “books” and “book-material,” for publishers discovered that they could send “books” through the mail at much cheaper rates if they didn’t look like books (133). In the 1830s and 40s story papers began to appear, which merely serialized books in newspaper format, taking advantage of the low rates. Publications such as Brother Jonathan and the New World started printing gigantic issues, some measuring four feet by seven feet and weighing over a pound, while still mailing them for 1.5 cents. In 1852, the rate for periodicals, which had been different from newspapers (the distinction depended on frequency, format, and content), was made the same as the newspaper rate. Not only did this provide further incentives for publishers to disguise books as periodicals or newspapers, it lowered the prices that people expected to pay for reading matter. The early dime novels were paid for in advance, and then mailed out, most often with the postage to be paid by the recipient; this was the primary mode of paying second-class postage well into the 1870s. George Munro, instead of using the Beadle trademark image of a dime on the title page, used an image of a ten-cent postage stamp, cementing the connection between price and distribution. This method of distribution seems to have changed quite soon, however, especially with the appearance of the American News Company in 1864, which served as sales agent for all Beadle publications. Beadle dime novels were still available through the mail, but the ANC had a standing order of 60,000 for each number that they in turn distributed to booksellers and newsdealers nationwide.

This did not lessen the importance of postal rates, however, since an 1861 ruling had allowed agents to receive periodicals at the same rates as individual subscribers. So large shipments of dime novels could be sent to “subscribers,” i.e., news agents, who then sold them at their newsstands. Publishers still had to ensure that their products looked like periodical literature in order to qualify for the lower rates. Dime novel publishers engaged in a continual game of cat and mouse with the Postal Service, which accounts for many of the changes in dime novel format. In 1885, the Postal Service issued a definition of mail that would qualify for the lower second-class rate, stating that it must “be published at stated intervals—four times a year at least—to issue from a known office of publication, possess a legitimate subscription list, and have no bindings of board or cloth” (Fuller 133). This requirement of “stated intervals” made reprints an even more attractive option to publishers, since it is much easier to actually issue something at regular intervals if no writers are involved. The Postal Service's new definition of second-class mail enabled most dime novel publishers to sneak traditional dime novels through at the lower rate, but with the advent of broadsheet, or quarto, publications such as Beadle's “Half-Dime Library”—which looked like newspapers—the issue was made somewhat moot. In 1890, however, the Postal Service excluded the “dime libraries,” which were mostly pirated reprints, from second-class rates, claiming that they were not “periodicals” and that most were sold on newsstands anyway. But even though the mail continued to serve as a vital distribution channel for dime novels, the way in which actual readers acquired them changed drastically, and with significant results.5

This shift from mail distribution to newsstand sales worked to change both the readership of the dime novels and the cultural perception of their value. Once dime novels were readily available at newsstands, instead of through the mail, they became more accessible to young readers who were impatient with their money and whose parents kept a closer eye on the mail than they did on their sons. In the 1870s, when the price dropped to a nickel, dime novels became accessible to an even broader range of low-income and young readers. The lower price, combined with the change in format to broadsheets, made dime novels look more like less reputable forms of reading, such as the Police Gazette, which was reflected in how they were perceived. Anthony Comstock made this connection manifest at the opening of his chapter dealing with dime novels in Traps for the Young, which begins, “And it came to pass that as Satan went to and fro upon the earth, watching his traps and rejoicing over his numerous victims, he found room for improvement in some of his schemes” (20). Satan finds that the daily and weekly press

were too high-priced for children, and too cumbersome to be conveniently hid from the parent's eye or carried in the boy's pocket. So he resolved to make another trap for boys and girls especially. He also resolved to make the most of these vile illustrated weekly papers, by lining the news-stands and shop windows along the pathway of the children from home to school and church. … (20)

The appearance of colored cover illustrations in 1874 provides additional evidence for the shift from consumers buying direct from the publisher through the mail to buying at newsstands or bookstores. Colored covers only make sense if readers can both see the cover at the point of purchase and compare it to the competitors' (presumably uncolored) products. The use of cover illustrations increased the similarity these novels bore to more suspicious forms of literature, since the illustrations became more lurid as competition increased. William Graham Sumner, in an 1880 diatribe entitled “What Our Boys Are Reading,” wrote that the new novels targeted at boys, “to judge by the pictures, are always worse than the old” (Sumner 367, italics mine). The two quotations from Brander Matthews at the beginning of this article illustrate this distinction. In his later quotation, he is nostalgic for the “saffron-backed Dime Novels,” while in 1883 he condemned the “villainous sheets” for their corruption of the young; he clearly considered the two formats to represent different kinds of texts. As these two novels illustrate, the distinction between the two was not one of subject matter, but of format and readership. Suddenly they were the chosen distraction for hordes of boys, especially, in William Graham Sumner's words, of the “idle and vicious boys in great cities” where newsstands proliferated, instead of shared family reading material (367). As Sumner notes, these novels, which he finds “indescribably vulgar,” “can be easily obtained and easily concealed, and it is a question for parents and teachers how this is to be done” (369, 377). By 1880, the changes in distribution and format discussed above were firmly in place, and were clearly working to change Sumner's, and many others', view of dime novels' salubrity.

The many recollections of dime novel reading assembled by Edmund Pearson in his 1929 book Dime Novels constitute a wonderful body of anecdotal information about the genre, especially about its reputation, since the questions he asked of his acquaintances about their juvenile reading habits seem to have been focused on the issue of whether or not dime novels were forbidden by the respondents' parents. The responses highlight the connection between reputation and format and distribution. Pearson recounts a story included by famed dime novelist Edward S. Ellis in a new introduction to Seth Jones about Ellis's involvement with his church Sunday School. Ellis presented the Sunday School superintendent with a finely bound volume, asking if he thought it suitable for inclusion in the church library. When the superintendent told Ellis that he found the book morally upright and eminently appropriate, Ellis informed him that it was merely one of his own dime novels that he had had rebound, with the closing admonition: “The good brethren who gave that vicious French novel a prominent place in the Sunday-school library would have revolted at the proposal to put this little story beside it, for the reason that it has a paper cover, [and] is of a salmon color …” (qtd. in Pearson 103). George Ade observed of the later quarto format publications that, “One reason for the enduring popularity of the nickel library was that it could be spread open inside of a school geography and entirely concealed from any teacher who did not approach from the rear” (qtd. in Pearson 239). Many of Pearson's respondents mentioned that the size and thinness of the quarto format novels made them perfect for hiding within more respectable reading material, both at home and at school, illustrating that Sumner's fears were not entirely without basis. Frank O’Brien told Pearson that his parents destroyed his cache of “Jack Harkaway” novels, but approved of the “Frank Nelson” stories: “The principal difference was, I think, that [the Frank Nelson stories] came in book form, and therefore parents thought it was O.K.” (qtd. in Pearson 249).

It is telling that almost all of Pearson's sources seem to recall dime novels as being forbidden, or at least disapproved of, and that none recall receiving them through the mail. Those men who did confess to having read dime novels said that they either bought them at newsstands or bookshops or found them in attics, barns, and outhouses. Even more importantly, several of these men remember their families receiving story papers through the mail, and that they were considered acceptable reading, despite the fact that they contained many stories that either had appeared or would appear as dime novels and nickel weeklies. Many of his sources also distinguish between dime novels and the nickel libraries, saying that the latter were much more disreputable—again, the primary difference being price and format—while some respondents seem aware that the dime novels, the nickel libraries, and the story papers were really all the same in terms of content. The editor Marc Connelly noted that:

Dime novels did not circulate in my set. However, our parents referred to the nickel weeklies we read as ‘dime novels.’ I spent a good part of my ninth, tenth, and eleventh years explaining the difference, but it never did much good. Occasionally I found myself in possession of a real dime novel; I believe my acquaintance with Nick Carter and his faithful Chick, came exclusively through that high-priced medium. It was a pleasant acquaintance, but (could it have been the difference in price?) they never fascinated me as did those two detectives of the five cent libraries, ‘Old’ and ‘Young King Brady.’ (qtd. in Pearson 240)

These recollections of youthful reading offer clues to the ways in which the format, price, and means of acquisition of books conditioned the responses of both readers and non-readers (parents) to these books. When viewed through the prism of the values and strictures of late nineteenth-century American bourgeois culture, these factors combine to produce both a class-biased response to the later dime novels and a nostalgic longing for the earlier, “purer” examples of the genre. Many came to believe that the cheap format meant more lurid stories, and thus, even as the texts themselves did not change, felt that the genre was going downhill. This view has been internalized by many contemporary scholars, who frequently invoke this narrative of degeneration when discussing the dime novel in its later stages without acknowledging the relative textual stability of the genre.

While it is impossible to generalize from two examples, these two dime novels provide evidence that leads to a fuller view of the “decline” of the genre. Instead of attributing the increasing cultural suspicion of dime novels to a decline in quality of the texts, changes in format, price, and distribution may play significant roles in how this fiction was perceived. Factors such as these are beginning to play a more prominent role in literary and cultural studies of nineteenth-century America more generally, but they are often only taken into account as an afterthought. It is by now a commonplace when analyzing any contemporary media that “the medium is the message.” Nevertheless many scholars of the nineteenth century still tend to ignore that the medium through which a text is presented is an essential element of that text's message. No different from readers today, nineteenth-century Americans did not judge books without their covers. The case of the dime novel and its fluctuating reputation is an example of the extent to which “material literacy” was expanding along with textual literacy in nineteenth-century American society in ways that were crucial to the reception of texts on the part of readers and non-readers alike.

Notes

  1. See McKenzie. In Buntline's case, this analysis is complicated by the racial content of the two novels, as well as Buntline's well-known role as one of the founders of the Know-Nothing Party. The novels examined for this paper are two frontier-themed novels, both set in central Texas during the years of the Texas Republic. Buntline's politics combine with the Texas setting to offer representations of Indians and Mexicans that would be of crucial importance in the ways in which the books were recycled and repackaged, especially with regard to their cover art. This held true for the industry in general, as is indicated by Erastus Beadle's answer in 1884 to a reporter's question about how Beadle and Adams dealt with rivals who published trashier novels: “Oh, we had to kill a few more Indians than we used to; we held our own against them” (qtd. in Pearson 99).

  2. This 1877 edition appeared in the new quarto format that had been introduced a month earlier with the “Fireside Library” series. This format was roughly 12″ × 9″, and consisted of no more than 8 stapled leaves, making for a very thin text block, which looked a great deal like a newspaper. The name of “Starr's New York Library” was changed to “Beadle's Dime Library” after No. 26, but the first 26 numbers were reissued, printed from the same plates but with a new heading inserted. According to Johannsen, some numbers were issued with the new series name heading simply pasted over the previous heading, yet another type of physical recycling engaged in by Beadle, this time to get rid of excess stock.

  3. Not only did Beadle use the same plates for its reprintings in the same series, but the 1900 edition of Stella Delorme was printed from the same plates as the 1860 Brady edition, which itself may well have been printed from the same plates used when the story appeared in the Mercury in 1859. The plates appear to have been saved in columns instead of pages; the columns were split up and spliced together differently depending on the size of the pages being printed. This fact underlines the extent to which Beadle, and their competitors, mastered the art of textual recycling within the corporation—not only were books recycled textually, but the physical plates from which the books were printed were made with such eventual recycling in mind. This outlook was not limited to plates of text, as the front page of the 1900 edition bears one of the illustrations that was in the 1860 edition, but with the Indians in the background effaced and a different caption.

    This same physical recycling of plates occurred in the case of Munro's Old Nick of the Swamp as well. The 1908 Ivers edition was printed from the same plates as the 1868 Munro edition, although two pages evidently had to have new plates made, as the line endings differ and the type is much clearer.

  4. As Richard John notes, “Prior to 1851, postal regulations excluded books from the mail altogether; even after this date, postal officers regarded their transmission as an unusual event” (39). The prohibition, dating from 1799, on the mailing of packets weighing more than three pounds effectively barred packages of books from the mail. According to Richard Kielbowicz, however, some postmasters were willing to accept books for mailing, although, in the absence of any explicit policy, they were able to charge exorbitant rates if they so desired (133). Books were not admitted without restriction to the mail until the New Deal, and then only by Presidential order.

  5. The 1900 edition of Stella Delorme shows how completely newsstand sales had taken over. The back page of the broadsheet is an advertisement listing 190 numbers of “Beadle's Dime Library,” stating that they are for sale “by all newsdealers, ten cents per copy, or sent by mail on receipt of twelve cents each. Beadle and Adams, Publishers, 98 William Street, New York.” But Beadle and Adams had gone out of business and moved out of 98 William Street in 1896, when M. J. Ivers, located at 379 Pearl Street, bought out their stock. Nevertheless, Ivers continued to cling to the efforts to present the Dime Library as a periodical for postal purposes; the heading states that the broadsheet is “Entered as Second Class Matter at the New York, N.Y., Post Office.”

Works Cited

Buntline, Ned, [Judson, Edward Zane Carroll]. Old Nick of the Swamp; or, The Bravo's Vengeance. New York: George Munro & Co., 1868.

———. Old Nick of the Swamp. New York: M. J. Ivers & Co., 1908.

———. The Red Warrior; or, Stella Delorme's Comanche Lover. New York: M. J. Ivers & Co., 1900.

———. Stella Delorme; or, The Comanche's Dream. New York: Frederick A. Brady, 1860.

Comstock, Anthony. Traps for the Young. New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1884.

Denning, Michael. Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working Class Culture in America. New York: Verso, 1987.

Fuller, Wayne. The American Mail: Enlarger of the Common Life. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1972.

Johannsen, Albert. The House of Beadle and Adams and its Dime and Nickel Novels. 2 vols. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1950.

John, Richard. Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 1995.

Kielbowicz, Richard. News in the Mail: The Press, Post Office, and Public Information, 1700-1860s. Westport: Greenwood P, 1989.

McKenzie, D. F. “What’s Past is Prologue,” The Bibliographic Society Centenary Lecture (July 14, 1992). N.p.: Hearthstone P, 1993.

Nye, Russel. The Unembarrassed Muse: The Popular Arts in America. New York: Dial P, 1970.

Pearson, Edmund Lester. Dime Novels; or, Following an Old Trail in Popular Literature. Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 1929.

Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 1970.

Sumner, William Graham. “What our Boys are Reading.” in Earth-hunger and Other Essays. New Haven: Yale UP, 1913.

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Malaeska's Revenge; or, The Dime Novel Tradition in Popular Fiction

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