The Beadle Collection of Dime Novels. New York Public Library

Through the generosity of Dr. Frank P. O’Brien of New York, who has given this collection to the Library, it is possible to place on exhibition about fourteen hundred of those rare little books and magazines which, beginning about the year 1859, were issued in America under the broad and general title of “Dime Novels.” These are separate publications from the house of Beadle and Adams, of which Erastus Beadle, the Otsego printer, was the originator and guiding spirit. The remaining 171 items in Dr. O’Brien’s gift are examples of those other novels which sprang into existence as a result of the popularity with which the Beadle books were greeted from their first appearance. For lack of space, they are not in the exhibition. The collection, as shown in the Main Exhibition Room, constitutes an absorbingly interesting assemblage of a pioneer literature which has now wholly vanished, but which, for a generation, exercised a profound influence on the country’s thought, character, and habits of mind.

No less than thirty-one various “types” or “series” of books, pamphlets, magazines, and periodicals are embraced in the Beadle exhibit. Of certain types which were published but for a short time only, or which have become most difficult to discover, only a few copies are shown. Other varieties, whose regular appearance extended over a considerable period of years, are in some few instances represented by hundreds of different titles. The publications are of all sizes, from little 24mos to large folio sheets as big as a modern newspaper. More than half of the different series were originally issued in illustrated covers or wrappers of different colors, and they are thus shown. They come in brown, blue, orange, tan, green, yellow, red, buff and in various combinations of those hues, and in plain black-and-white. Nearly all are shown in the exhibition cases in a manner to reveal their outward appearance and the dramatic or quaint illustrations with which they were embellished, but certain of the books of each variety are opened for a proper display of the title-pages.

Although every one of the thirty-one types of Beadle books (and doubtless many of the individual items also) will awaken vivid memories in the minds of elder visitors, the dominating influence of the exhibition—especially to those historically inclined—will be the effect which it produces as a whole. The collection is literally saturated with the pioneer spirit of America. It portrays the struggles, exploits, trials, dangers, feats, hardships, and daily lives of the American pioneers from the days of the Puritans to the death of Custer, and breathes the spirit which, for two and a half centuries, shaped the conquest and development of the Continent north of the Rio Grande. It is a literature intensely nationalistic and patriotic in character; obviously designed to stimulate adventure, self-reliance and achievement; to exalt the feats of the pioneer men and women who settled the country; and to recite the conditions under which those early figures lived and did their work.

It is in those obvious qualities that the cause of the immense vogue of the Beadle books is to be found during their generation. It was in those attributes, also, that their equally great popular influence lay, and no serious student who seeks to understand the history of this country and many of its present tendencies, can fail to obtain a better understanding of such matters by a study of the collection now on view. It is a clinic in the subject of mass psychology; as valuable to the university professor for its significant historical revelations as it is to the gray-haired man to whom it recalls memories of boyhood.

Erastus Beadle, who did so much to perpetuate and glorify in print the deeds of the American pioneers, was born in the village of Pierstown, Otsego County, New York, September 11, 1821. His later interest in the subject of American pioneer life, and his devotion to the cause of recording its annals, is no doubt traceable to his own ancestry and to the experiences of his youth. The grandfather of Erastus was Benjamin Beadle, of Wethersfield, Connecticut, who fought in the Revolution under General John Sullivan and General George Clinton. Four generations of Benjamin Beadle’s ancestors were born in or identified with Salem, Massachusetts, where Samuel Beadle died about 1664. Descendants of Samuel fought in the French and Indian Wars.

Benjamin, the Revolutionary soldier, removed to New York in 1796. He traveled by sail-boat from Connecticut to New York City; thence up the Hudson to Lansingburg; and by horses and wagons overland through the wilderness to Otsego County, on Stewart’s Patent, near the present Richfield Springs. This pioneer was married three times, and was the father of twenty-three children. The father of Erastus was named Flavel Beadle, and was a son of Benjamin’s second wife. Flavel Beadle was eight years of age during the journey into the New York wilderness, and was there later married to Polly Tuller, who had come from Massachusetts.

In 1833, when Erastus was twelve years old, he, in his turn, was to enjoy his first extensive experience of wilderness journeying. He accompanied the rest of the family on an overland migration to the town of Schoolcraft, in Kalamazoo County, Michigan Territory, which pilgrimage occupied many weeks. But the Far West of those days did not suit Flavel Beadle, and he brought his family back to New York about two years later.

Seth Jones By Edward S. Ellis Type A

Cover in Three Colors Type B

As a boy, Erastus Beadle worked on a farm, and as apprentice to a miller. It was while he was a miller’s apprentice that he laid the foundation of his future career as a printer. Need arose in the mill one day for some letters to be used in labeling the bags of grain. Erastus cut the letters from blocks of hardwood, just as the old block-letters had been made in the days before Gutenberg. He then left the mill, and, with an alphabet of his home-made wooden type, he traveled about the region stamping bags in various mills and similarly marking lap robes, wagons, and other things. On reaching Cooperstown he came to the attention of Elihu Phinney, the pioneer printer of that town, who offered him work. In Phinney’s establishment Erastus learned to be a type-setter, stereotyper, printer, and binder, and with these abilities as his only capital he moved to the village of Buffalo in 1847. By 1852 he had a printing shop of his own, and in that year he issued his first publication, entitled “The Youth’s Casket.” In 1856 he began to issue the excellent magazine called “The Home Monthly” (shown in the exhibition), and two years later he removed to New York City to test his great idea.

This plan was to issue “Dime” publications, and possibly had its immediate origin in the unusual success in Buffalo, of a “Dime Song Book” in which he had assembled a number of the penny lyrics of the period. These had been earlier issued in separate broadsides,

Скачать книгу