Beadle & Vanduzee (1851-1853)
Beadle & Brother (1853-1856)
Irwin P. Beadle & Company (1860)
Beadle & Company (1860-1872)
Beadle & Adams (1872-1898)

Beadle & Adams, though not the most significant publisher in terms of women’s dime novel romances, often receives a prominent position in the history of dime novel publishing, and, indeed, the firm is significant for the successful development of the cheap fiction publishing formula. The firm was the first cheap fiction publisher to put out inexpensive mass fiction in a series. The first series, issued in July 1860, was known simply as Beadle’s Dime Novel series. The first title was Malaeska: Indian Wife of the White Hunter by Ann S. Stephens.

Although other publishers had attempted to sell cheap books before, Beadle and Adams revolutionized the field of cheap fiction by drastically lowering the price to a mere ten centers when other books were selling for a dollar or a dollar and half. In order to make a profit selling the books so cheaply, Beadle & Adams used several cost cutting strategies. First, they used the least expensive paper available in conjunction with cheap bindings and cover illustrations. They also standardized the publishing format so that every book was exactly the same in size as every other in the series–setting a standard at 6 and 5/8th inches by 4 and 1/2 inches–the precursor to the modern mass-market paperback. This saved money since press and typesetting specifications were identical for each book published. They also made use of previously published work, either paying the author a small fee to use the work again, as in the case of Ann Stephens whose Malaeska had first appeared in The Ladies Companion in 1839, or outright pirating the work from British authors and publishers and not paying for its use at all.

Once the series took off, bolstered perhaps by bored military men who read them to pass the time in the Civil War, and Beadle & Adams had proven that selling very inexpensive books could be profitable, other publishers were quick to adopt the new cost cutting strategies and Beadle and Adams faced stiff competition. One strategy the firm employed to face this competition was to join forces with an established distributor, Sinclair Tousey’s American News Company. Their marketing strategies also included one of the first attempts to catch the reader’s eye and each new title was issued in a brightly colored wrapper with an illustration depicting an exciting moment in the story. These wrappers where often orange and contributed to the term yellowback to used disparagingly later to describe “trashy fiction.”

Important writers who published with Beadle & Adams included Ann Stephens, Metta Victor, William Frederick Cody (Buffalo Bill). Their key series included the Beadle’s Dime Novel Series, the Dime Library, The Fireside Library patterned after The Lakeside Library, a juvenile series known as the Half-Dime Library in 1877 and in 1879 their first series devoted exclusively to women’s romances, The Waverly Library. In addition to these key series and multiple less successful series, Beadle & Adams also published cookbooks such as Metta Victor’s Dime Cook-Book. A Directory for the Parlor, Nursery, Sick Room, Toilet, Kitchen, Larder, etc. Songbooks, joke books and humorous stories.

Although other publishers in the cheap fiction business would find serialized story papers to be their biggest profit makers, Beadle & Adams stayed primarily with books. Their only long lasting serial was the Saturday Journal. Though the firm did well in the 1860s, they never reached the prominence of other cheap publishers who would move in and dominant the cheap fiction market in the 1870s to 1890s. The year 1891 marked the end of the dominance of all cheap fiction publishers when the International Copyright law put an end to reprinting British material.

For more information about their series for women, such as Girls of Today and the Waverly Library, read about Women’s Dime Novel Romance Series and Story Papers.

Readers interested in detailed information about the firm are directed to Albert Johansson’s The House of Beadle of Adams. This reference work, the result of years of painstaking research by Johanssen is one of the most impressive histories of a publishing firm ever compiled. [A complete version of the book is online by Northern Illinois University Libraries.]

References and Additional Information

“Dzwonkoski, David. “Beadle and Adams.” The Dictionary of Literary Biography, 43-49.

Johannsen, Albert. The House of Beadle and Adams and its Dime and Nickel Novels: The Story of a Vanished Literature. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1950.

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Irwin Beadle & Company
George Munro & Company

George Munro was a successful publisher of cheap fiction whose firm operated from 1865 to 1893. Munro was born in Nova Scotia, Canada, on November 12, 1825. His first career plans were directed at scholarship and teaching. He studied theology and taught mathematics from 1850 to 1856 at the Free Church College in Halifax, N.S. Though trained as a minister, he never served as one. Instead, in 1856 he moved to New York City where he was employed by the American News Company and next by Beadle and Adams. In 1863, he left Beadle and Adams with Irwin Beadle to create Irwin Beadle and Company. Irwin, who had a history of irregular employment, left the firm in 1864 and the firm was renamed George Munro and Company. In 1868 the firm was renamed again, this time to simply George Munro and it would so remain until Munro retired in 1893. For the entire history of the firm, it conducted business in New York City.

In 1867 Munro introduced The Fireside Companion, an inexpensive story paper aimed at all members of the family. This was a successful publication and circulation grew until it reached 250,000 in 1883 (Shove, 57). The Seaside Library, his most successful publishing, venture was introduced in 1877. The first titles in the series were English classics such as Jane Eyre, Adam Bede, and The Last Days of Pompeii, but he did not maintain this highbrow tone for long. Eventually the library included all of the most popular writers of sensational women’s fiction such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Charlotte Breame, and her American “counterpart” Bertha Clay.

Despite the fact that Munro was not technically a dime novel publisher, for many of his series, such as The Seaside Library, sold for twenty and twenty-five cents per copy (Shove, 63), he was a resounding success in the field of cheap publishing. The popularity of The Fireside Series was so phenomenal that by 1879 the series contained 560 titles and sales were reported to be five and one half million copies (Shove, 61). These great sales would not remain unchallenged and eventually other publishers would introduce “libraries” of cheap books sold in a series. Editors at Publishers’ Weekly noted that his activities had:

Affected the book publishing business in this country to
an extraordinary extent. The people now buy nearly all
their light reading, and that is about three quarters of what
they read, in the form of reprints, which are sold at prices
not much above those of newspapers…Foreign stories
could not be sold, as before, for fifty and seventy-five cents,
but must be put on the market for ten and twenty cents”
(Publishers’ Weekly, September 23, 1882: 432).

The difficulty of categorizing cheap fiction by price alone is heightened by the attempts of cheap publishers to reach out for better off consumers. George Munro often republished hisSeaside Library titles in cloth-bound versions for fifty cents. And eventually, in 1887, he cut the price of his paper bound editions from twenty and twenty-five cents to ten cents in response to the intense competition (Shove, 63).

One of Munro’s first attempts to reach women in the cheap fiction market was his New York Fashion Bazaar which appeared November 8, 1879 and featured the story, The Romance of Darkecliffe Hall; or, The Story of My Life on the front cover. The price for each issue was five cents. Based on its appearance, it seemed that Munro intended his publication to compete with other middle-class periodicals aimed at women, but his choice of editor, Laura Jean Libbey, suggests that he hoped for a working-class audience. Libbey edited the magazine from 1891 to 1894 and received $10,400 a year for this position, a substantial salary by any standard, particularly for a woman (Walcutt, 403). Despite this investment in one of the most popular cheap fiction authors of the day, Munro’s publication ceased in 1894. This was his only serious attempt to reach women by the time he retired in 1893 he had never made a substantial contribution to the genre.

Munro remained active in the business almost thirty years. He retired in April 1893, just a month before the great financial panic of 1893. Upon his death in 1896 at Pine Hill, his country home in the Catskill Mountains, he was reputed to have an estate worth ten million dollars. This figure may be exaggerated, but it demonstrates that Munro hit a chord with his cheap books and that his firm served millions of eager readers. He was buried in Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York.

For details on the women’s series published by George Munro, please continue on to the George Munro section in Women’s Series and Story Papers.

References and Additional Information 

“Death of George Munro.” New York Times. April 25, 1896: 1.

“George Munro.” Publishers Weekly. May 2, 1896: 769.

Shove, Raymond. Cheap Book Production in the United States, 1870 to 1891. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Library, 1937.

Stern, Madeleine. Publishers for Mass Entertainment in Nineteenth Century America. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co, 1980: 221-223.

Walcutt, Sue. “Laura Jean Libbey.” Notable American Women: 1607-1950. Edited by by Edward James. Cambridge, Mass: Kelknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971, II: 402-403.

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One of their first stories was Lilac the Wanderer, or the Perils of Beauty which according to copy in the paper would:

Show up, in their true colors, those human vampyres, who prey upon the necessitous and ignorant emigrants, of both sexes, who land upon our shores. The heroine is a noble-souled and pure, but unfortunate orphan-girl, who is forced by circumstances to leave her home in Europe and come to this country. Upon arriving here, she falls into the clutches of the soulless ruffians alluded to, and her suffering and narrow escapes from a fate worse then death are graphically sketched by the author. In the course of the Story, the reader is introduced both into the miserable hovel of poverty and into the mansion of luxury and wealth, and a clearer insight is had into all classes of society (Quoted in Noel 111).

When Street & Smith bought the paper in 1855 their circulation was low at 18,000. Considering their youth and relative inexperience, they did fairly well for a small newspaper and gradually increased circulation. What set them up for the enormous success they would achieve, however, was their reaction to the panic of 1857. Larger publishers relied on subscriptions for their main source of income. Recreational expenses are one of the first expenses people cut during severe economic downtown, and naturally subscriptions to all manner of periodicals tapered off during the severe depression that followed the panic. Street & Smith, perhaps because of their inexperience and lack of knowledge of how things “should” be done, took a different tact. They decided to concentrate on newsstand sales. Newsstand sales had the advantage of being all cash and no credit. They were immediate, and, best of all, news dealers were in general avoided by other publishers as a means of distribution (Smith 21). Using this new method of distributing their magazine, Street & Smith managed not only to survive the panic, unlike more established magazines such as Graham’s Magazine or the New York Mirror, respected publishing concerns that went out of business, they also made money.

One of their first serials was The Vestmaker’s Apprentice, written by Frances Smith himself, was launched in October 1857, right before the panic. (Smith was a regular contributor for years which helped the firm save money on material.) The story was a huge success and Street & Smith claimed to have sold over 60,000 copies of the first installment–tripling circulation from its original low of 18,000. When the panic hit Street & Smith employed another novel idea–they printed extra copies of the next installment, sent them to their newsdealers and instructed them to give them away for free (Smith 21). News dealers were informed that “They can have as many copies as they can use to advantage, free of cost, for gratuitous circulation” (qtd in Smith 21). They gave away an installment of a new story hoping that readers would be willing to pay to find out what happened in subsequent issues.

Street & Smith built on the success of The Vestmakers Apprentice by following it up with another story about a young women endangered by lecherous men, Maggie, The Child of Charity; or, Waifs on the Sea of Humanity. The predominate story of the day may have been the sentimental tale, but Street & Smith published stories that were on the sensational side of the sentimental. But they hoped to set themselves apart by claiming that their stories were based on fact. In an announcement for the forthcoming story Belle Bingham: or, The Perils of the Poor, they claimed, “It is a Revelation from Real Life. We do not care to deal in fiction and romance when there is so much that is far more exciting than the most fertile imagination can invent to be found in everyday life” (qtd in Smith 23). There was a prejudice among middle-class readers against reading strictly for entertainment and especially against reading exciting fiction. Street & Smith attempted to assuage critics of sensational fiction by framing their stories as didactic and taken from real life. Thus in the same announcement they claim:

This campaign of claiming to print decent, real life stories to edify the readers, while at the same time publishing stories that were as sensational as any of the trashy story papers, gave Street & Smith the winning combination they needed to boost circulation. In 1859, at the time they took over final control of the magazine from Williamson, they had increased readership from 18,000 to 80,000. They had won the public over by printing tales of women in danger and especially by highlighting the perils of working-class women as exemplified in Frances Smith’s most popular story Bertha, The Sewing Machine Girl. This story would develop a life of its own, being reprinted multiple times and going on to become an extremely popular melodramatic drama that played for years after its first appearance. Street & Smith knew that their readers wanted the new romances, even in a publication that catered to male and female readers.

Street & Smith were also one of the first publishers to advertise on billboards and posters. They built billboards beside the railroad tracks between New York and Philadelphia and plastered posters all over New York City (Smith 30). Since at the time billboards were so new they didn’t have to pay rent to the landholders and because they didn’t pay for the use of the walls they decorated with their own posters, they developed a way to advertise their magazine and increase circulation for a minimal outlay. They also continued the practice of distributing copies of the magazine free to news dealers all over the United States. They always made the free copy the first issue of a serialized cliffhanger to entice the reader to buy the next installment (Smith 32). Using these new advertising methods they pushed circulation even higher to 150,000 copies a week and over the next few years circulation doubled to 300,000 (Smith 32). Now they were giving the most popular story of the day, Robert Bonner’s New York Ledger, a run for its money and the Weekly became serious competition for the Ledger’s 400,000 readers.

Street & Smith took one marketing technique from Bonner’s repertoire and began to develop a body of writers who promised to work for them exclusively. They convinced May Agnes Fleming to write only for them and they began to steal writers away from Bonner, including the wildly popular Charlotte M. Brame, who they won by offering twice as much money as Bonner had paid her (Smith 38). And it was Smith who transformed her from Charlotte M. Brame, to the new find of Street & Smith, Bertha M. Clay (Smith 38). Additional writers included Mary J. Holmes who contributed over 27 serialized novels to the Weekly and Edward Ellis, the creator of the popular character Seth Jones. Unlike other publishers who dealt primarily in copyright free material and avoided payments to authors, Street & Smith were willing to pay their exclusive authors well. Mary J. Holmes received as much as $5,000 per serial (Smith 38). Although the perils of the shop girl and adventures in the city had been a very successful formula for the magazine since Street & Smith introduced it in 1857, by the 1860s Street & Smith began to develop a different approach more in line with the advent of the new dime novel and its focus on western and detective adventures. Though the type of story published in the dime novels influenced them, they focused on weekly story papers as their method of publishing for years.

It was not until 1889 with their creation of the ten cent Log Cabin Library, aimed at adults with detective and western stories and the five cent Nugget Library, aimed at younger readers, that Street & Smith would publish in the dime novel format (Reynolds 76-77). Though this distinction mattered to the publishers because story papers were decidedly cheaper to print and bind, and it came to matter to the reader who preferred the convenience of the dime novel’s smaller size and increased portability, it did not matter in terms of content. The stories were the same and the same authors wrote them. They only difference was the format. In addition to the smaller size, they introduced the innovation of four-color covers–a move to make the new library stand out against its more established dime novel libraries and competitors.

Their romance series for women included theBertha Clay Library begun in 1900, the Romance Series begun in 1899, and the New Romance Library begun in 1909. This move was consistent with their predominance in the women’s field in the later part of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. Unlike Beadle and Adams and George Munro who \introduced women’s series in the 1870s and early 1880s only to have them fail shortly after, Street & Smith began to offer women’s series and libraries in 1897 and developed them into a solid aspect of the firm’s business. For a complete discussion of the women’s series, please continue on to the Street & Smith section of “Women’s Dime Novel Romance Series and StoryPapers.”

Gradually the popularity of dime novels and story papers waned and the firm changed their focus to the new pulp magazines. The firm has the remarkable distinction among cheap fiction publishers from the nineteenth century of being the only firm that is still in business. In 1959 the firm was purchased by Conde Naste and today Street & Smith continues to publish periodicals, specializing in sports publications.

References and Additional Information 

“Francis Scott Smith.” New York Times, 16 April 1883: 5.

Gossage, Leslie. “Street and Smith.” Dictionary of Literary Biography. 444-450.

Noel, Mary. Villains Galore: The Heyday of the Popular Story Weekly. New York: Macmillan, 1954.

Reynolds, Quentin. The Fiction Factory. New York: Street and Smith, 1955.

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