The Beadle Collection of Dime Novels: Given to the New York Public Library by Dr. Frank P. O'brien
1922
The Beadle Collection of Dime Novels: Given to the New York Public Library by Dr. Frank P. O'brien
1922
In the 1860s, a New York printer named Erastus Beadle changed American culture forever by pricing novels at exactly one dime. This catalog documents the legendary collection he built: 1,400 fast-paced stories of frontier violence, historical adventure, and relentless action that fed the ravenous reading public's imagination. These were America's first mass-market paperbacks, sold on street corners and in train stations, and they shaped the national character in ways that still echo through our culture today. This 1922 NYPL catalog preserves the only substantial record of a vanished literary phenomenon. The Beadle and Adams empire produced stories featuring real historical figures, imagined frontiersmen, and morally uncomplicated heroes who solved problems with their fists and guns. These books were controversial in their time, condemned by moralists who feared their influence on young readers, yet they were read by everyone from factory workers to presidents. The collection documents series titles, publication dates, and authorship attributions that have since become bibliographic mysteries, many written under house pseudonyms now impossible to trace. For bibliographers, historians of American print culture, and anyone fascinated by the republic's raw early popular literature, this catalog is an essential artifact. It maps a literary Wild West where anything sold, anything was printed, and a generation learned to read America through penny dreadfuls that cost almost nothing but meant everything.
