Dime novel

Dime novel, though it has a specific meaning, has also become a catch-all term for several different (but related) forms of late 19th-century and early 20th-century U.S. popular fiction, including "true" dime novels, story papers, five- and ten-cent weekly libraries, "thick book" reprints, and sometimes even early pulp magazines. The term was being used as a title as late as 1940, in the short-lived pulp Western Dime Novels. Dime novels are, at least in spirit, the antecedent of today's mass market paperbacks, comic books, and even television shows and movies based on the dime novel genres. In the modern age, "dime novel" has become a term to describe any quickly written, lurid potboiler and as such is generally used as a pejorative to describe a sensationalized yet superficial piece of written work.

History

In 1860, publishers Erastus and Irwin Beadle released a new series of cheap paperbacks, entitled Beadle's Dime Novels. The name became the general term for similar paperbacks produced by different publishers throughout the early twentieth century. The first book in Irwin and Beadle's series was Malaeska, the Indian Wife of the White Hunter, by Ann S. Stephens, dated June 9, 1860. The novel was essentially a reprint of Stephens' earlier serial that appeared in the Ladies' Companion magazine in February, March and April 1839. It sold more than 65,000 copies within the first few months of its publication as a dime novel. The dime novels varied in size, even within this first Beadle series, but were roughly 6.5 by 4.25 inches (16.5 by 10.8 cm), with 100 pages. The first 28 were published without a cover illustration, in a salmon colored paper wrapper. A woodblock print was added with issue 29, and reprints of the first 28 had an illustration added to the cover. Of course, the books were priced at ten cents.