Erastus Flavel Beadle was an American printer and pioneer publisher of pulp fiction.
Background
Erastus Beadle was born on September 11, 1821, in Stewart's Patent, later Pierstown, a village near Cooperstown, in Otsego County, New York, the son of Flavel and Polly (Turner) Beadle. He was a descendant of a seventeenth-century Samuel Beadle of Salem, Massachussets, and a grandson of Benjamin Beadle, Connecticut veteran of the Revolution.
Education
After a boyhood spent on farms in New York and Michigan, Erastus was apprenticed to a Chautauqua County, New York, miller. In the mill he cut hardwood types for labeling flour bags, and made the process so effective that he developed an itinerant business of lettering for millers and farmers at a penny a letter.
Career
Becoming interested in printing, Beadle got a job in 1841 with H. & E. Phinney of Cooperstown, printers and publishers, and learned the trade thoroughly. About 1850 Erastus and his brother Irwin went to Buffalo, where in 1852 they formed the firm of Beadle & Brothers, stereotypers. Soon they did printing as well, and Erastus began the publication of a magazine Youth's Casket, 1852-57, later adding the Home, a Fireside Monthly, 1856, the name of which was changed in 1860 to Beadle's Home Monthly. The firm became Beadle & Adams, including Robert Adams and the two brothers, and about 1858 moved to New York City, though Irwin had also a bookstore in Buffalo.
Noting the large sale his brother had for songs as penny broadsides, Erastus conceived the idea of collecting the texts of such songs in a little paper-backed volume to be called the Dime Song Book. It sold astonishingly and was followed by other songbooks, as well as by dime jokebooks, recitations, letter-writers, and guides to etiquette. From these dime books it was an easy step to the publication of cheap fiction, which was begun with Orville J. Victor as general editor.
The first novel issued was Malaeska, the Indian Wife of the White Hunter, a story of about 128 pages, written by Ann S. Stephens and put out in 1860 in saffron-colored paper covers. It was instantly successful, the initial sale running to 65, 000 copies and later printings into the hundred thousands. It had first appeared as a serial and the book rights had been bought from Mrs. Stephens for $250. The venture had paid so handsomely that it was naturally repeated again and again. The tales appeared in a number of series - Beadle's Dime Novels, Beadle's Dime Library, American Tales, Beadle's Boy Library of Sport, Story, and Adventure, Beadle's Half-Dime Library, Beadle's Pocket Library. Orville Victor was a competent editor, a former contributor to Graham's Magazine. He undertook to keep the level of Beadle's Dime Novels high, seeking out the best authors and observing strict propriety; and in this he was highly successful.
Maum Guinea and Her Plantation "Children" (1861) by Metta Victor, was a slave romance comparable in its influence to Uncle Tom's Cabin and so popular that half a million copies were sold in the United States and a hundred thousand in England. It was Number 33 in the series. Another, Seth Jones, or the Captives of the Frontier, by Edward S. Ellis, also had an enormous sale. A great impetus to the production of the dime novels was the discovery that they were eagerly desired by the soldiers in the Civil War, and wagon-loads of new issues were sold at the front.
After the war Beadle featured stories of the West. He himself went to that region to get Indian scouts and trappers to write for him firsthand accounts of their adventures. As a result, "the Beadle books, " it is said, "present a more accurate and vivid picture of the appearance, manner, speech, habits, and methods of the pioneers than do the more formal historians. " Irwin Beadle sold his interest in the firm in 1862 and Robert Adams died in 1866 and was succeeded in the business by two sons. After 1875 stories of the West were less popular and Beadle turned to stories of crime and New York life. He retired in 1889 with a large fortune and spent the rest of his life on his estate "Glimmerview" at Cooperstown, where he died on December 18, 1894. His grave is in Lakewood Cemetery, Cooperstown.