Winton M. Blount Symposium on Postal History, November 4, 2006 Smithsonian National Postal Museum, Washington, D.C.

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1 Smith v. Hitchcock (1912) and the Death of the Dime Novel Dr. Ryan K. Anderson Winton M. Blount Symposium on Postal History, November 4, 2006 Smithsonian National Postal Museum, Washington, D.C. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. wrote in his decision on Smith v. Hitchcock (1912), We may say... a printed publication is a book when its contents are complete... deal with a single subject, betray no need of continuation, and, perhaps, have an appreciable size.... From this point of view Tip Top Weekly and Work and Win are books. 1 The Supreme Court justice made this statement before addressing whether or not Postmaster General Frank Hitchcock gave Street and Smith Publishing a proper hearing before deciding that Tip Top belonged in the third, rather than second, class. By differentiating Tip Top from periodicals, he forced the last of the great cheap publishers into selling pulp magazines and killed the dime novel in America. 2 Holmes found this issue placed in front of him because of the relationship between the growth in periodicals over the course of the late 1800s and an escalating post office deficit. Critics pointed to the Classification Law of 1879 as the genesis of this problem. That statute, written by a conference of publishers, extended the rate of two cents per pound to magazines and newspapers. In 1885, again with publishers input, Congress halved that rate to one cent per pound and clarified the terms for entering an item into the second class by stating that the publication must: (1) appear at least four times a year from a stated location, (2) possess list of legitimate subscribers, (3) have neither cloth, nor board bindings, and (4) contribute to either American intellectual life or the expansion of scientific and technological knowledge. These measures assured that

2 2 native knowledge and culture grew during a time of dramatic economic, social, and cultural upheaval that the people who shaped public opinion that Congress had their fiscal success in mind. Opponents worried that the porous law let industrial interests advertise under the guise of publishing and allowed degrading reading s circulation alongside legitimate literature, argued that unscrupulous interests took advantage of the law to gain an unfair advantage in the marketplace. In 1891, Postmaster General John Wannamaker noted that 1,600 tons of second-class matter traveled through the mails daily. Mail traffic increased twelvefold between 1885 and Estimates made in 1890s put the annual postal deficient at somewhere around two million dollars annually. 3 The Post Office proved incapable of resolving the efficiency issues creating this extraordinary expense. Postmasters knew the courts would not help them after 1877, when a federal judge upheld Donnelley, Lloyd, and Company s right to ship reprinted books as periodicals. With the judiciary on the side of the publishers, postal officials avoided throwing good money after bad into pointless court cases. Even if they wanted to test the waters again, the increasing number of publishers meant facing a case load with a propensity for ballooning a manageable size. Congress proved little help over the coming years, despite repeated pleas from the postmaster general. Not only did they pass the 1879 law preventing houses like Donnelley, Lloyd, and Company from going to court, but they also remained unsympathetic through the 1890s; few congressmen bothered listening when California Representative Eugene Loud he railed against second class postage. Despite Theodore Roosevelt s desire for efficient and

3 3 responsive government that ironed out antiquated practices, the oval office lent little direct assistance because attacking second class inefficiency meant delaying the development of rural free delivery and upsetting publishers. Even worse, when two separate commissions in the early 1900s looked into the post office s problems they emerged even more confused than before because of the department s mismanagement. The post office faced an impossible job because mail traffic increased beyond what they could manage and neither Congress, nor the judiciary supported changing second class mail standards. 4 In an ironic turn, the periodical market s growth created differences between magazines and books that led to Holmes s barring of Tip Top and Work and Win from the second class. This expansion derived from the deepening relationship between advertisers and editors, who created what some historians call the new magazine. Blending informative essays, good fiction, informative topical articles, reader letters, illustrations, and product placement, editors like George Lorimar, Walter Hines Page, and Edward Bok married literary practice and the emerging American consumer ethos. They did such a good job at this over the course of the 1890s that by the time the twentieth century opened, middle-class America associated the term magazine with periodicals modeled after Ladies Home Journal and World s Work. Dime novels, such as Tip Top and Work and Win, certainly adopted some of these changes (in-house advertising, reader response, and expert authors, just to name a few), but they looked less and less like magazines as the years passed because their content remained rooted in a single serialized story each issue, rather than an array of articles. They prospered because of

4 4 advantageous postal regulations, a growing market for their wares, and their success in selling books while posing as periodicals. The increasingly obvious differences between the new magazines and the weeklies opened the door for the postmaster general s office when it realized the Supreme Court, influenced by Justice Holmes, revisited its cases with the assumption that it might have to reinterpret the law in light of changing social circumstance wrought by industrial capitalism s growth. 5 My paper then, explores the interconnected nature of postal regulation, the business of commercial entertainment, and changes in popular culture so as to give us a clearer idea of why dime novels faded from popular culture s landscape. In the past, observers blamed omnipotent market forces, changes in audience, and new forms of entertainment for the dime novel s decline without explaining exactly how this occurred. The oft-quoted dime novel aficionado Edmund Pearson explained in 1929, [dime novels] have been killed by yellow journalism, by the moving pictures, and for all I know, by the War, and by Prohibition. 6 Christine Bold, in her work Selling the Wild West, noted that changing postal regulations had a hand in this process, though it was not within the scope of her work to examine how this happened. 7 Many scholars assume that dime novels died of natural causes after outliving their usefulness. This overlooks the fact that cheap reading did not disappear, that Street and Smith transitioned into the pulp market, that Tousey tried to follow them, and that a close relationship between dime novels and pulp fiction existed. No writer considers dime novel publisher as anything other than mass publishers. This work remedies these oversights by focusing on how Street and Smith abandoned dime novels not because they grew unpopular, but

5 5 because of production impossibilities deriving from the Holmes decision, giving us a greater understanding of the historical influences shaping changes in American culture. 8 Loopholes, Batch Production, and the Smith v. Hitchcock Decision The decision handed down by Holmes closed the loophole ensuring Street and Smith s prosperity by defining the differences between magazines and books. Until the twentieth century, doing this remained impossible because the periodical format remained in flux. Before magazines enjoyed their growth spurt, they serviced homogenous, but unspecific audiences. Editors assumed that the people they catered to wanted the same things they themselves wanted out of reading, but did not go so far as create titles for specific subsets of readers like layers, housewives, or baseball players. Even titles like St. Nicholas, aimed at children, enjoyed a family readership. But by 1889, Publishers Weekly recognized the growth in specifically inexpensive juvenile titles featuring material uninteresting to anyone other than children. Some people, like Century Company president Frank Scott, doubted that the boom in inexpensive literature would last. In 1894, he argued that cheap magazines are largely in the experimental stage, and that in the long run a [fifteen] cent magazine will be but a [fifteen] cent magazine no more, no less. 9 A decade later, these publishers had not washed out of the market and the debate shifted in tone. Frederick Leypoldt, editor of Publishers Weekly, admitted that the question was not if cheap magazines would live, but instead, whether books or parts thereof issued serially are periodicals. 10 As the 1900s opened, what content actually appeared in between the covers mattered little as long as it fit the format guidelines established by law. 11

6 6 Street and Smith built their empire on this loophole. When Ormond Smith and George Smith assumed control from of the house in the mid-1880s, one title, The New York Weekly, acted as the basis of the house s enterprise. Authors such as Horatio Alger, Charlotte M. Brame, and Ned Buntline provided them with stories that they sold twice: one in New York Weekly and again as a paperback. Both traveled through second class mail because the New York Weekly generated enough material that the house released paperbacks four times a year, thus meeting the letter of the 1885 law. The brothers Smith continued this practice with two new titles, The Log Cabin Library (for adults) and The Nugget Library (for children); they had enough success that they expanded their weekly line to thirty new titles, including Tip Top Weekly (1896), over the next two decades. They also introduced three general readership magazines that mimicked the new magazine format: Ainslee s Magazine (1898), Popular Magazine (1903), and Smith s Magazine (1905). 12 All of these titles met the criteria for second class mail because the house maintained a subscription list, covered their product with paper (not cloth or board), issued the titles from their headquarters in New York City on a weekly basis, and improved the moral standards of the nation s readers in the case of Tip Top, they stated that this ideal publication for the American youth fostered the appreciation of manly virtues. Even as the venerable House of Beadle and all of the competitors other than Tousey folded during the 1890s, they grew and eventually acquired their competitors literary stock. 13 Their success came from using Tip Top as a tool within the batch production system that made them successful reprinters. Working in this fashion meant remaining

7 7 efficient, flexible, and convincing consumers that the product they bought possessed special qualities. Editorial hunches, detailed reports from the circulation managers, fan mail to the author, dispatches from dealers across the nation, and, most importantly, and published letters all contributed to what the house knew about their readers. Learning readers tastes proved especially important since profits lay not with circulation, but with reprinted paperback and cloth editions of the Merriwell Saga sold in newsstands, department stories, or though orders placed with coupons printed in Tip Top. While weekly sales a nickel a purchase paid for paper, ink, intellectual and physical labor, and shipping, paperback and cloth bound reprints (clusters of Merriwell s weekly adventures bound in numbers of anywhere from three to twelve individual stories) sold at anywhere between a quarter and a dollar and a quarter. Reprint sales minus a few fixed costs came as pure profit. Street and Smith believed success lay with publishing books for children, not magazines. But they also knew they could not compete with the established book publishers for material or attract the advertising revenue needed for a new magazine aimed at children. By defining their enterprise as a periodical, they subsidized the acquisition of fiction, identified more specific consumer base, and created a profitable space between magazines and books. 14 Maximizing this revenue meant taylorizing the process the house used when learning about, writing, and distributing the stories readers told them they wanted. The two-way line of communication between readers and the house acted as the lynchpin in the process. The readers, of course, paid the cost of a stamp to send in a letter into Mssrs. Street and Smith in the hopes that their missive appeared on the pages of

8 8 Applause. 15 On other occasions they sent in postcards provided by the publisher, postage prepaid, that provided specific information, such as my favorite summer sport, or, the most important job a man can have. The house responded by shaping its offering according to its readers wishes and shipping it via the postal service and newsstand sales. Even though newsstand sales supplied by the American News Company became more and more the favored method of distribution in cities and small towns, the postal service still provided the mass of readers with their weekly fix of Merriwell. 16 Without a tie into the subscription community, Street and Smith would lose communication with a significant portion of their audience and left guessing as to what they wanted to read in Tip Top. 17 This became a stronger possibility once the postmaster general s office assumed an activist role during the Progressive Era. Critics of government excess believed that the post office s responsibilities outgrew the department s reach, but that the logic behind the laws defining the postal class system remained solid. Postmaster General Charles E. Smith, for instance, blamed enormous wrongs... grown up in the perversion and abuse... [of] second-class matter for the post office deficit. 18 Misuse, of course, originated with those cheap publishers, like Street and Smith, who prospered only because of the postal privilege. Postal service advocates needed a method for separating real periodicals from sham periodicals. Loud s failures proved Congress s apathy, but President Roosevelt caught in between the rock of second class postage and the hard place of rural free delivery left his postmaster generals with a weapon in the appointment of Oliver Wendell Holmes to the Supreme Court. After years behind

9 9 the Donnelly barrier, postmasters realized that the judicial atmosphere, now reflecting the call for a recasting of America that fit the emerging century, warranted a reinvigorated effort at barring illegal publications from the second class. When publishers realized the office s intent in 1901, they had Congress pass a law assuring them of a hearing before expulsion. As Publishers Weekly noted, the primary issue any judge confronted in future cases was whether the publication at hand was a legitimate serial.... [and] to say what they shall or shall not contain, or how their contents will be presented, or how the publisher shall do his business. 19 Surely no judge had any inclination towards abridging American business growth. 20 Within a few years, Street and Smith publishing found itself a primary target of the Postmaster General. Henry Payne removed The Medal Library, the paperback that the house sold Merriwell reprints through, from the second class, which escalated distribution costs. The company protested this setback, but the courts established an ominous precedent when they upheld the decision in Smith v. Payne (1904). Another blow came a few years later when the post office decided that schemes... in which prizes are offered for the best for a magazine or corporation, the best story, the best suggestion, the best essay or letter, etc., are regarded as lotteries, and thus illegal to conduct through the mails. 21 This further hampered Street and Smith s system of production by taking away their most direct method of soliciting specific information about future content. After 1905, Street and Smith realized that they could no longer depend on Congressional protection, but that they were on track for confrontation with the postal service. 22

10 10 In 1908, when Postmaster General George Von Lengerke Meyer removed Tip Top from the second class, he began the process that led to Smith v. Hitchcock. Holmes opened his decision by stating that the bill under consideration prevented Hitchcock from revoking second-class privileges because the house never had a fair hearing due to them by law. Rather than addressing the first issue he took up the matter of Tip Top s nature. Content, he noted, consisted of a single story, a honor roll of subscribers, pages of advertisements, and letters from readers, all more or less incident to the muscular tenor of the tales... laudatory... [and full of] insignificant comments. 23 Each story stood on its own as an independent tale, the characters carried through successive issues, and readers expected further adventures of the same sort with the same characters. He cited Houghton v. Payne next, pointing to Justice Henry Billings Brown s support of the post office s redefinition of periodical and to act as a virtual legislator because his move fit the context of the changing times. 24 Holmes, arguing that periodicals in 1912 differed from periodicals in 1879, announced that if he decided Tip Top did not fit in the category of magazine, as its publishers claimed, the issue of the fair hearing was void. Holmes then declared Tip Top a book. He discarded the publisher s argument that it was a magazine because they did not buy its narrative and reprint it pointing out that the house s Medal Library reprinted Tip Top s stories and that according to the nice shade of meaning given to it by popular speech the completeness and continuity of topic held therein made it a novel. A periodical, he clarified, took its meaning not just from the

11 11 definition put forth by the Postal Law of 1879, but also by the contemporary understanding that magazines offered a variety of articles and topics on a particular subject, as did The Ladies Home Journal, Harper s Weekly, or The Century did. Publishers could not rearrange content s physical appearance to fit either book or magazine formats. Tip Top s stories stood complete on their despite their serial nature and the other features acted as mere window dressing. Holmes dispatched the original cause of the case by deciding Street and Smith was in the business of selling books, not magazines. This decision wrecked Street and Smith s reprinting enterprise by handicapping the system that generated original content for books. Without Tip Top and the other house weeklies, Street and Smith would have to find anew way to survive because they could no longer compete with established book publishers. The case came not from a misstep on the part of Street and Smith or a vindictive postal service, but instead, a change in the intellectual underpinnings of the court that decided such cases, via Oliver Wendell Holmes s influence. As John Menard s recent work The Metaphysical Club reminds us, Holmes's legal theory and practice took shape from the principle that law rooted itself not in precedent, but in experience. Common law presented fact situations arising from the need for a reinterpretation of law that fit contemporary society. Doing so proved tricky because Holmes decision took shape from the balance of imperatives deriving from the creation of a more efficient postal service, fair business practice, the support of legitimate publishers, and the facilitation of moral literature. His ability to do so came from a meta-imperative created by the issue of literary character, which let him defuse the political landmine of rectifying problems

12 12 with second class mails without crippling periodicals, the diffusion of knowledge, or upsetting legitimate publishers. Making this decision depended less on legal precedent than on reading social and cultural practices that defined the differences between books and magazines. Holmes did not think it necessary to overturn all legal precedent, because the form of law its logic gave a framework to the felt necessities of the time... culture that told one the life of the law and the form of its execution. 25 Street and Smith, then, saw the way they went about conducting business compromised because Holmes believed that the law ought to be what it pretty much already is, only under a wrong description and part of righting that misunderstanding meant affirming that weekly serials were books because average Americans perceived of them as such. 26 Conclusion The Hitchcock decision forced Street and Smith s abandonment of dime novels. Street and Smith editor Howard Rothstein told author William Wallace Cook in 1909 that the house had its eye on the case, because it determined what stories they might pay to have written. In regard to the MOTOR STORIES, he commented,... it is impossible for us to get the second class mailing privileges on the publication. The house did not even bother making an application for Motor Stories, but he added, if we win the suit that we have against the government for the re-instatement of TIP TOP, we are going to put MOTOR STORIES through. It would be a great help to its circulation. 27 Needless to say, a dime novel with such a title never appeared. But, Tip Top and Merriwell did

13 13 not fade away with their format. New Tip Top Weekly, featuring the adventures of Frank Merriwell, Jr., tried revamping the saga in the pulps before going under after only a few years. Over the course of the next four decades, Street and Smith turned on occasion to their best known story for material in various pulp titles, such as Top Notch and Sport Story. While audience voice remained important to the house (as it did with all pulp publishers), they began drawing on emerging marketing techniques based in social science research, fleshed out with the fan mail that continued pouring into their offices. The Smith brothers did well enough in the pulp field that they eventually established a separate press for novels called Chelsea House. The dime novel era and batch production might have ended in 1912, but their influence carried on in Street and Smith s success through mid-century Tip Top Weekly, published by Street and Smith and authored by Gilbert Patten writing as Burt L. Standish, sold upwards of somewhere between 150,000 and 200,000 copies each week. The title featured the Merriwell Saga, which detailed the ongoing adventures of Frank Merriwell, a schoolboy athlete who epitomized the ideal youth. I use the term dime novel because most scholars outside of the field of popular literature label it thus, but a more accurate description of Tip Top is as weekly serial. For a discussion of the different types of literature that fall under the heading dime novel and the problems with that tag, see Michael Denning s Mechanic s Accents (1987), pp Frank Tousey entered a separate suit from Street and Smith for the same reasons regarding his title Work and Win, so Holmes considered both bills together while focusing on Street and Smith s Tip Top Weekly. 2 Smith v. Hitchcock, 226 U.S. 53 (1912) 3 Wayne E. Fuller, The American Mail: Enlarger of the Common Life (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1972), ; Clyde Kelly, United States Postal Policy (New York, NY: D. Appleton and Company, 1931), 76; Jane Kennedy, "Development of Postal Rates: ," Land Economics 33 (1957): 98-99; Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines: , vol. 4 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), Fuller, ; Kelly; Theodore Peterson, Magazines in the Twentieth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1964), 95-99; Lydia Cushman Schurman, "The Librarian

14 14 of Congress Argues Against Cheap Novels Getting Low Postal Rates," in Pioneers, Passionate Ladies, and Private Eyes: Dime Novels, Series Books, and Paperbacks, (New York, NY: Haworth Press, 1996), Fuller, 140; West James L. W., III, American Authors and the Literary Marketplace Since 1900 (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), 17-19; Mott, 3-11; Richard Ohmann, Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century (New York: Verso, 1996), 23-30; Peterson, 2-4; Jennifer Scanlon, Inarticulate Longings: The Ladies Home Journal, Gender, and the Promises of Consumer Culture (New York, NY: Routledge, 1995), 5, 9, 18; Robert E. Spiller, Willard Thorp, Thomas H. Johnson, Henry Seidel Canby, Richard M. Ludwig, William M. Gibson, Literary History of the United States, 4th ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1974), ; Ronald Weber, Hired Pens: Professional Writers in America's Golden Age of Print (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1997), 79; Christopher P. Wilson, The Labor of Words: Literary Professionalism in the Progressive Era (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1985), xv, Edmund Pearson, Dime Novels; or, Following an Old Trail in Popular Literature (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1929, reprint 1968), Christine Bold, Selling the Wild West: Popular Western Fiction, (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987), Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America (New York, NY: Verso, 1987), 201; Richard B. Kielbowicz, "Postal Subsidies for the Press and the Business of Mass Culture, ," The Business History Review, 64 (1990): ; Ohmann, ; Weber, "The Making of Magazines," Publishers' Weekly 45 (1894): "Second-Class Matter and Postal Censorship," Publishers' Weekly 65 (1904): "Quarto Juveniles," Publishers' Weekly 36 (1889): The list of new weekly titles introduced during the 1890s and 1900s, taken from pages of Quentin Reynolds house history, include: Good News (1890), Nick Carter Detective Library (1891), New York Five Cent Weekly (1892), Diamond Dick Library (1895), Diamond Dick Junior Library (1896), Red, White, and Blue Library (1896), Tip Top Weekly (1896), The Yellow Kid (1897), Army and Navy Weekly (1897), Adventure Library (1897), Half-Holiday (1898), True Blue (1898), Klondike Kit Library (1898), Starry Flag Weekly (1898). The efforts proved successful and the house continued the trend through the first decade of the twentieth century with seventeen new titles: Do and Dare Weekly (1900), My Queen (1900), Shield Weekly (1900), Comrades (1900), Boys of America (1900), Buffalo Bill Stories (1901), Jesse James Stories (1901), Brave and Bold (1902), Old Broadbrim (1902), Young Rover (1904),

15 15 Rough Riders (1904), Red Raven (1905), Paul Jones (1905), All-Sports (1905), Bowery Boy (1905), Might and Main (1906), Motor Stories (1909). 13 See, for example, the cover and Applause column in: Burt L. Standish, [Gilbert Patten], "Frank Merriwell as Full Back; or, True to His Colors," Tip Top Weekly, 13 November For Street and Smith buying competitors stock, see: "Untitled Piece on Street and Smith Buying Gunter's Magazine," Publishers' Weekly 1908; "Untitled Piece on Street and Smith Buying Robert Bonners Son's Plates," Publishers' Weekly For background on the house, see: "Francis S. Street Obituary," New York Times, 16 April 1883; J. Randolph Cox, The Dime Novel Companion: A Source Book (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000), 25-26, 90, 124, 272; Leslie Gossage, "Street and Smith," in American Literary Publishing Houses, , Part 2: N-Z, ed. Peter Dzwonkoski (Detroit: Bruccoli Clark, 1986), 444; Jean Carwile Marsteller, "Street and Smith's News Trade Bulletin: Marketing Popular Literature in the Late Nineteenth Century," The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 83 (1989): 82-84; Mott, 65; Mary Noel, Villains Galore: The Heyday of the Popular Story Weekly (New York: Macmillan, 1954), 47, ; Quentin Reynolds, The Fiction Factory; or, From Pulp Row to Quality Street: The Story of 100 Years of Publishing at Street and Smith (New York: Random House, 1955), Batch production, see: Regina Lee Blaszczyk, Imagining Consumers: Design and Innovation from Wedgwood to Corning (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 2-3; Marina Moskowitz, Standard of Living: The Measure of the Middle-Class in Modern America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 1-18; Philip Scranton, Endless Novelty: Specialty Production and American Industrialization, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 10-13, For Street and Smith s growth and company outlook, see: Street and Smith, The Greatest Publishing House in the World (New York: Street and Smith, 1905). 15 See, Applause in: Burt L. Standish, [Gilbert Patten], "Frank Merriwell's Great Victory; or, The Effort of His Life," Tip Top Weekly, 8 June 1901; Burt L. Standish, [Gilbert Patten], "Frank Merriwell's New Boy; or, The Folly of Dale Sparkfair," Tip Top Weekly, 17 March 1906; Burt L. Standish, [Gilbert Patten], "Frank Merriwell's Victory; or, The Winning Oar," Tip Top Library, 30 January I am using newsstand as a generic term. Readers bought Tip Top not only at curbside stands, but also at candy stores, drug stores, tobacco stores, and book stores. The house lumped all these sales points together because they supplied them through the American News Company. 17 Mott, "The Postmaster General on Second-Class Mail Matter," Publishers' Weekly 60 (1901): 1388.

16 16 19 "Second-Class Matter and Postal Censorship," For postal reform in the 1890s and 1900s, see: "Postal Law Changes," Publishers' Weekly 49 (1896); "Postal Reform," Outlook 93; Henry A. Castle, "Some Perils of the Postal Service," The North American Review172; C. H. Howard, "Publishers and the Postal Department," The Arena 26; Eugene Loud, "The Need of Postal Reform," The North American Review 166; Mott, "Postal Matters: Ruling Regarding Prize Contests," Publishers' Weekly 68 (1905): Smith v. Payne, 194 U.S. 104 (1904); Fuller, Smith v. Hitchcock, 226 U.S. 53 (1912) 24 Houghton v. Payne, 194 U.S. 88 (1904) 25 Louis Menard, The Metaphysical Club (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), Ibid., Howard W. Rothstein, New York City to William Wallace Cook, New Orleans, Louisiana, 12 March TLS, Street and Smith: File, William Wallace Cook Papers, , Box 4, Manuscripts and Rare Book Room, New York Public Library, New York City. 28 On pulp magazines and advertising, see: Christine Bold, "Maleska's Revenge; or, The Dime Novel Tradition in Popular Fiction," in Wanted Dead or Alive: The American West in Popular Culture, ed. Richard Aquila (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 6-7; Edward T. LeBlanc, "A Brief History of Dime Novels: Formats and Contents, ," in Pioneers, Passionate Ladies, and Private Eyes: Dime Novels, Series Books, and Paperbacks, (New York:: Haworth Press, 1996), 18; Sean McCann, "'A Roughneck Reaching for Higher Things': The Vagaries of Pulp Populism," Radical History Review 61 (1995): 18; Reynolds, ; Oliver Zunz, Why the American Century? (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998). On Chelsea House: Henry Ralston, New York City to Arthur P. Hankins, San Anselmo, California, n.d. TLS, Correspondence, Memoranda: , 51, n.d. Folder, Street and Smith Records, Editorial Files, Syracuse Special Collections, Box 40; C. Kearton, London to Henry Ralston, New York City, 12 December TLS, Correspondence, Memoranda: , 51, n.d. Folder, Street and Smith Records, Editorial Files, Special Collections, E.S. Bird Library, Syracuse University, Box 40.