Background
George Munro was born on November 12, 1825, in West River, Pictou County, Nova Scotia. He was a member of a large family and was dependent upon his own efforts for anything more than an elementary education.
George Munro was born on November 12, 1825, in West River, Pictou County, Nova Scotia. He was a member of a large family and was dependent upon his own efforts for anything more than an elementary education.
Munro learned printing in the office of the Pictou Observer, attended Pictou Academy three years.
After teaching three years at New Glasgow, Munro became instructor of mathematics and headmaster of the Free Church Academy in Halifax. He was winning a reputation as a teacher, when, in 1856 with several hundred dollars saved up, he suddenly departed for New York City.
There he worked at various jobs; he was for a time in the employ of the American News Company, and, about 1863, he became a clerk in the firm of Beadle & Adams, dime-novel publishers.
Scarcely a year later Munro began his own publishing house, and a decade later he was Beadle's most formidable rival. "Munro's Ten Cent Novels" were patterned after Beadle's original dime novels, and the series soon numbered several hundred titles.
Munro began the publication, in 1867, of the Fireside Companion, a cheap family paper of entertainment and amusement that reached a phenomenal circulation figure.
In 1872 he published Old Sleuth the Dectective by Harlan P. Halsey, the first of the famous Old Sleuth Series by that author, which eventually totaled over one hundred titles. This was followed by the scarcely less popular Old Cap Collier Series. However, his most successful venture was the "Seaside Library, " a series of reprints of English works in paper-covered, octavo pamphlets, which could be forwarded in the mails at newspaper rates. The works of Scott, Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Charles Reade, and other standard British writers were printed in this manner with no thought of compensation to the authors. Through the medium of the American News Company the nearly 2, 000 titles that eventually were included in the series were scattered broadcast through the country and sold for ten cents each. Though the margin of profit was small, he rapidly became rich.
On Vandewater and Rose streets he erected in 1883 a nine-story building with the most up-to-date equipment then known to care for his tremendous output. Though his reprints undoubtedly brought to the masses cheap and, at the same time, good reading material, they also hastened the passage of the international copyright law, when the more dignified publishers at last arrayed themselves in favor of the copyright side. His interest in education led him to give liberally for education purposes. He was of great assistance to Dalhousie University at Halifax, when for a time its very existence was at stake, and endowed it with professorships of English literature, history, physics, metaphysics, and constitutional and international law. He also established tutorships in the classics and mathematics and an endowment for competitive scholarships. His total benefactions to this school amounted to about half a million dollars. George Munro died on April 23, 1896, in Pine Hill, New York.
George Munro was a benefactor and long a member of the council of the University of the City of New York.
In build George Munro was sturdy of frame and slightly below the average height.
He was simple and frank in character, eminently practical, and possessed a high capacity for application to his business.
George Munro was married to Catherine, the daughter of Alexander Forrest of Halifax, by whom he had two sons and two daughters.