Erasmus Beadle launches the era of inexpensive popular reading with his first "dime novel"
Erasmus Beadle published his first of many "dime novels" in New York City with the sale of Ann S. Stephens' Malaeska, the Indian Wife of the White Hunter. Stephens' novel was the repackaging of a serial Stephens had first published in the Ladies' Companion two decades before. Beadle bought the story for $250 and sold more than 30,000 copies. He then put out two ten-cent novels a month and set in motion a publishing phenomenon that was to dominate popular reading in the United States into the twentieth century. (By John Osborne)
Source Citation
Ann S. Stephens and Chris Enss, Myra, The Child of Adoption (Guilford, CT: Globe Pequot Press, 2006), xiii.