The Industrial Revolution meets Public Education

The opening of the west by railroad moved people further from the traditional methods of big city retail while making mail-order sales faster and more reliable. This plus the ever better paper-making technologies that caused the price of paper to plummet from $100 per ton to only $4.00, made the manufacture of paperbound books more tempting. Still, main-stream publishing houses, the Harpers and Appletons and Scribners, shy away from placing their distinquished names on such a cheap looking product.

Railroad travel generated an additional demand for inexpensive throw-away literature than could be read during a trip. Chicago, rail center for the United States, became a hotbed of publishers issuing "railroad literature", most of which was cheap romances, joke books, and true crime stories wrapped around railroad time-tables. Rand McNally, famous today for its road maps, began life publishing "railroad literature" of questionable quality. These disposable books were almost always bound by staples and paper.

In late 1860, the Beadle Brothers issued in an unusually small, 4 3/8 x 6 1/2, 96 page format a paper bound novel reprinted from a magazine serial titled Malaeska: Indian Wife of the White Hunter by Mrs. Ann S. Stephens. The subject matter was almost identical to that of the more popular chapbooks. Other magazine reprints in the same Beadle Brothers style soon followed. Identified as "dime novels" because of their price, they were intended for travellers, but with the outbreak of the Civil War the books found a new market among soldiers. (There is a definite link between war-time and paperback sales as weary soldiers seek recreation between marches.) This fresh demand forced Beadle to create "writing factories", groups of hack-writers producing novels as quickly as possible. But they were paid well, anywhere from $75 to $150 per series. Fictional stories about real people such as Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett led to fictional characters such as Deadwood Dick, Jumbo Joe, and Darky Dan, one of the first portrayals of a black man as public hero. Each book was sewn for durability, had woodcut illustrations on the cover. Size varied, not all "Dime Novels" were the smaller format, nor did all of them have the trademark orange cover.

Beadle Dime Novels began a steady decline in popularity around 1874, considered bankruptcy several times in the 1880's and 1890's, changed ownership at least three times, but managed to continuing publishing in one form or another until 1937.

Their decline can in large part be attributed to the growth of competition. Although few traditional publishers wanted to be associated with the type of "literature" the Beadle Brothers were producing, there was no lack of enterpreneurs willing to gamble they could duplicate the Beadle's success.

Meanwhile, the traditional publishing houses, while scorning the product, could not ignore the profits the paperback publishers were making. In 1873, the "New York Tribune" revived the practice of the late 1830's of offering paperbound quarto-sized books as "extras" for ten cents and full-length novels by foreign authors---to avoid having to pay royalties---in a 7x5 magazine format for twenty cents each. And as had happened in the 1830's, the books found an enthusiastic market. Soon not only newspapers but mainstream publishers followed suit.

Perhaps to counter the negative stigma associated with paperbound books, each series had a name suggesting upper-class to recreation. "Lakeside Library" (from Donnelly in Chicago), "Riverside Library", "Fireside Library", "English Classic Series", and so forth. Critics called them "Cheap Libraries" mockingly, but there was no denying their success.

By 1885, nearly a third of the 4,500 titles published in America were paperbacks from these "cheap" libraries. Unlike the first paperback revolution, this time the market grew rapidly beyond mail-order. Railroads, as we have already seen, were a major distributor, dry goods stores stocked them, and they were hawked on the street corners by vendors eager for commission.

And that proved a problem. By 1890, the market was saturated, and prices began to fell as unsold stock mounted. Prices of five cents or even less became common. Finally, many were given away for free, or simply destroyed unsold.

The badly sputtering Second Paperback Revolution came to a formal end again at the hands of the United States Congress. Pressured by the major publishing houses, especially Appleton and Harper, Congress passed the International Copyright Law in 1891 that orderedl publishers to pay royalties to foreign authors. With the price of paperbacks under five cents, there was no way publishers could pay royalties, so the paperback book business died a second death.