Through the generosity of Dr. Frank P. O’Brien of New York, who has
given this collection to the Library, it is possible to place on
exhibition about fourteen hundred of those rare little books and
magazines which, beginning about the year 1859, were issued in America
under the broad and general title of “Dime Novels.” These are separate
publications from the house of Beadle and Adams, of which Erastus
Beadle, the Otsego printer, was the originator and guiding spirit. The
remaining 171 items in Dr. O’Brien’s gift are examples of those other
novels which sprang into existence as a result of the popularity with
which the Beadle books were greeted from their first appearance. For
lack of space, they are not in the exhibition. The collection, as shown
in the Main Exhibition Room, constitutes an absorbingly interesting
assemblage of a pioneer literature which has now wholly vanished,
but which, for a generation, exercised a profound influence on the
country’s thought, character, and habits of mind.
No less than thirty-one various “types” or “series” of books,
pamphlets, magazines, and periodicals are embraced in the Beadle
exhibit. Of certain types which were published but for a short time
only, or which have become most difficult to discover, only a few
copies are shown. Other varieties, whose regular appearance extended
over a considerable period of years, are in some few instances
represented by hundreds of different titles. The publications are of
all sizes, from little 24mos to large folio sheets as big as a modern
newspaper. More than half of the different series were originally
issued in illustrated covers or wrappers of different colors, and
they are thus shown. They come in brown, blue, orange, tan, green,
yellow, red, buff and in various combinations of those hues, and in
plain black-and-white. Nearly all are shown in the exhibition cases
in a manner to reveal their outward appearance and the dramatic or
quaint illustrations with which they were embellished, but certain
of the books of each variety are opened for a proper display of the
title-pages.
Although every one of the thirty-one types of Beadle books (and
doubtless many of the individual items also) will awaken vivid
memories in the minds of elder visitors, the dominating influence of
the exhibition--especially to those historically inclined--will be
the effect which it produces as a whole. The collection is literally
saturated with the pioneer spirit of America. It portrays the
struggles, exploits, trials, dangers, feats, hardships, and daily
lives of the American pioneers from the days of the Puritans to the
death of Custer, and breathes the spirit which, for two and a half
centuries, shaped the conquest and development of the Continent north
of the Rio Grande. It is a literature intensely nationalistic and
patriotic in character; obviously designed to stimulate adventure,
self-reliance and achievement; to exalt the feats of the pioneer men
and women who settled the country; and to recite the conditions under
which those early figures lived and did their work.
It is in those obvious qualities that the cause of the immense vogue
of the Beadle books is to be found during their generation. It was in
those attributes, also, that their equally great popular influence lay,
and no serious student who seeks to understand the history of this
country and many of its present tendencies, can fail to obtain a better
understanding of such matters by a study of the collection now on view.
It is a clinic in the subject of mass psychology; as valuable to the
university professor for its significant historical revelations as it
is to the gray-haired man to whom it recalls memories of boyhood.
Erastus Beadle, who did so much to perpetuate and glorify in print the
deeds of the American pioneers, was born in the village of Pierstown,
Otsego County, New York, September 11, 1821. His later interest in
the subject of American pioneer life, and his devotion to the cause
of recording its annals, is no doubt traceable to his own ancestry
and to the experiences of his youth. The grandfather of Erastus was
Benjamin Beadle, of Wethersfield, Connecticut, who fought in the
Revolution under General John Sullivan and General George Clinton. Four
generations of Benjamin Beadle’s ancestors were born in or identified
with Salem, Massachusetts, where Samuel Beadle died about 1664.
Descendants of Samuel fought in the French and Indian Wars.
Benjamin, the Revolutionary soldier, removed to New York in 1796. He
traveled by sail-boat from Connecticut to New York City; thence up the
Hudson to Lansingburg; and by horses and wagons overland through the
wilderness to Otsego County, on Stewart’s Patent, near the present
Richfield Springs. This pioneer was married three times, and was the
father of twenty-three children. The father of Erastus was named Flavel
Beadle, and was a son of Benjamin’s second wife. Flavel Beadle was
eight years of age during the journey into the New York wilderness,
and was there later married to Polly Tuller, who had come from
Massachusetts.
In 1833, when Erastus was twelve years old, he, in his turn, was to
enjoy his first extensive experience of wilderness journeying. He
accompanied the rest of the family on an overland migration to the
town of Schoolcraft, in Kalamazoo County, Michigan Territory, which
pilgrimage occupied many weeks. But the Far West of those days did not
suit Flavel Beadle, and he brought his family back to New York about
two years later.
[Illustration: SETH JONES