The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 49, July 1945 - April, 1946 Page: 336
717 p. : ill., maps, ports. ; 24 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Southwestern Historical Quarterly
Double Dan, The Dastard; or, The Pirates of the Pecos, all in
"Beadle's (New York) Dime Library."
Ingraham, so far as this writer is concerned, won the prize
with the title to "Beadle's Half-Dime Library," No. 702, Blue
Jacket Bill; or, the Red Hot Ranger's Red Hot Racket. 011
Coomes concocted an occasional "nifty"; for example, Tiger
Tom, the Texas Terror, the title of No. 218, "Beadle's Half-
Dime Library." Badger was no "piker" in the contest. One
of his best was Daddy Dead-Eye, the Despot of Dew Drop,
the title of No. 474, "Beadle's (New York) Dime Library."
Much has been said about the "Bang! and another redskin
bit the dust" opening paragraphs of Dime Novels. A casual
survey of sixty novels about Dime Novel Texas in the writer's
collection fails to bear out the contention that "action" open-
ings are the rule. For the sake of comparison, thirty novels
that originally sold for ten cents and thirty that sold for five
cents were used in the survey. Only three, or ten per cent of
the ten-cent sellers used action openings while twelve, or forty
per cent, of the five-cent sellers used action openings. The
same writers appeared in both the five- and ten-cent series,
but as the five-cent libraries were specifically written to appeal
to the more juvenile readers, it is not strange that the action
began with the first line.
The most frequent type of opening paragraph in the ten-cent
sellers, appearing sixteen times out of thirty in the survey,
was a description of the setting of the novel-a style intro-
duced to the readers of sub-literature by J. H. Ingraham,
father of Colonel Prentiss. A good example of this type of
opening paragraph is found in Indian Jake by Captain Flack,
"DeWitt's Ten Cent Romances" No. 45:
I am on the sea-shore: the sand under my feet is white and very firm.
It has been made so by the wash of the waves. Sea weeds of various
forms and shapes are tangled on the beach; beams from the West India
Islands of strange shapes and chestnut colors are scattered just above
the watermark, cast there by the waves. To the south and east the Gulf
of Mexico, with its dark blue billows, indigo in color from the deep blue
sky above, are by contrast white as the driven snow.
Not a redskin nor an outlaw was slain on the first page,
much less in the opening paragraph.
While the early writers for the ten-cent libraries were under
production pressure, it was but slight as compared to that of
the stampede days that began about 1884 when the publishers336
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 49, July 1945 - April, 1946, periodical, 1946; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth146056/m1/391/: accessed April 28, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.