Dime novels

 

Hi everyone-- I'm posting this quickly, just to circulate a couple of pictures. Dime novels were formulaic stories that were printed cheaply and in big numbers (and sold for very little money, hence their name). They were extremely popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century-- an average newsstand would have tons of dime novels for sale. There were lots of types of stories published as dime novels-- romances, detective stories, stories about extreme adventures in the wilderness, ghost stories-- but the most popular genre by far was the western. The westerns we think of today are mostly in the form of movies-- think of John Wayne (or John Grady) riding off into the sunset, having saved a frontier town from some bad guys-- but the western got its start in dime novels. The fact that the westerns were so, so popular is interesting-- it gives us some sense of just how much the cowboy/outlaw archetypes have influenced American culture.

Once Billy the Kid was killed, he became the topic of many time novels. Newspapers first printed stories about Billy, but it was dime novels that really capitalized on the exciting or romantic elements of his life-- so the Billy the Kid we get in Ondaatje's book is as much a product of fiction as he is of fact. 

I'm posting a couple of pictures of some dime novels (all of which are housed in Pitt's special collections!), just so you can get a sense of how colorful and cartoon-y the covers look. They're about the size of a single issue comic book, and about as thin-- they definitely feel like they were meant to be read and disposed of (consequently, most dime novels that are still around in archives are in pretty bad shape). There's something worth noticing about the juxtaposition of these juvenile books and the pretty violent moment in American history that they're capitalizing on.

See you all tomorrow--

Elizabeth