Lines from the Library

While we have a decent number of Penny Dreadfuls in Fales, we have a massive collection of Dime Novels. Back in the 1960s, Mr. Edward G. Levy donated an exceptional collection of Dime Novels to NYU. The finding aid to his collection is (at long last) available online at this address:

http://dlib.nyu.edu/findingaids/html/fales/levy.html

Unlike the term "Penny Dreadful," American Dime Novels were advertised as such. For instance:

Malaeska (1860), by Ann Stephens, is the first Dime Novel. It was number 1 in what would become a long series of Dime Novels published by the firm of Beadle and Adams under the "Beadle's Dime Novels" banner. If you really want to know more about Beadle & Adams, take a look at The House of Beadle and Adams and its dime and nickel novels; the story of a vanished literature by Albert Johannsen. It's three solid volumes of mind-numbing detail.

Here's a later title in the series:

And here's the back cover of another:

One notable point of difference between American Dime Novels and the English Penny Dreadfuls is that the Dimes are not serialized. The top right corner of Malaeska informs the buyer that this work is "Complete." Beadle's offered a new number in its Dime Novel series every month, but each number was a complete novel.

The other difference is subject matter. Instead of the sordid underbelly of London, Dime Novels generally featured adventures in the American West. Here's another fine illustrated cover:

It's not published by Beadle, it didn't cost a dime (fifteen cents for this one), but I'd still call this a dime novel. Notice that this one is also complete and part of a series. TWO series, actually.

Just as I've been doing with the Penny Dreadfuls, I'm working on adding the Genre/Form heading "Dime novels" to the BobCat records for our holdings. Because the bulk of our dimes are in the Levy Collection, they won't all show up in BobCat. Go straight to the Levy finding aid if you're keen to get your hands on the goods.

Of course, you'll also find heaps of British material in Levy too. Actually, there are some great runs of Story Papers in Levy, but that's another subject altogether.

Coming up next: Sir Walter Scott!

Time for another entry in the panorama of Totally Forgotten Novelists of Fales. Today's subject is one Frank R. Stockton. He wrote this book:

and about fifty others. Fales currently has 61 titles by Stockton, but some of these are different editions of the same title. You can find them all in BobCat.

I stumbled across Stockton in my investigations of early science fiction in the Fales stacks. We have both The Great Stone of Sardis (1898) and The Great War Syndicate (1889), two of Stockton's widely-imitated forays into science fiction. I particularly like this copy of The Great Stone of Sardis because it satisfies both my interest in 19th-century decorative bindings and my growing interest in early sci-fi.

Just so I can say I posted two entries in the month of April, here are some random Dime Novel covers:

As with many items from the Levy Dime Novel Collection, I'm not entirely sure these qualify as "dime novels" -- they're both novelizations of popular plays. But with covers like these, who wants to split hairs?

Let's take another trip back to the Old Weird America of the nineteenth century. I first came across Poor Mary Pomeroy several years ago:

Since then, I have kept an eye out for other examples of this cheap true-crime literature. Poor Mary Pomeroy dates from the 1870s, but these three are all from the 1850s.

Startling, thrilling AND interesting! That's quite a narrative. Fanny Danforth's story also features cross-dressing (she disguises herself as a man to go to sea in search of her lover) and pirates.

These aren't "dime novels" and they aren't "penny dreadfuls" -- they're cheap and sensational, but they all make some claim to being non-fiction. Except for Disappointed Love! which claims to be both FACT and FICTION!

I also suspect that these items were originally part of the Levy Dime Novel Collection -- years ago the Fales curators interfiled some of the Levy collection with the Fales American collection. One interesting thing about the Levy Collection is that Mr. Levy emphasized "feminine literature," hence the presence of such fine examples of crime, adventure, and heartbreak about women.

They remind me an awful lot of made for TV movies.

I could pull any number of Halloween-themed items from the vast collections in Fales. Something from our 18th-century Gothic holdings; something from Peter Straub or Stephen King or H.P. Lovecraft. Instead, I present you with one of the most underrated American masters of the weird and fantastic: The King in Yellow by R. W. Chambers (1895).

About half of the short stories contained in this volume are set in and around Washington Square. This passage from "The Repairer of Reputations" is one of the most chilling reading experiences I have ever had:

It was, I remember, the 13th day of April, 1920, that the first Government Lethal Chamber was established on the south side of Washington Square, between Wooster Street and South Fifth Avenue. The block which had formerly consisted of a lot of shabby old buildings, used as cafes and restaurants for foreigners, had been acquired by the Government in the winter of 1898. The French and Italian cafes and restaurants were torn down; the whole block was enclosed by a gilded iron railing, and converted into a lovely garden with lawns, flowers and fountains. In the centre of the garden stood a small, white building, severely classical in architecture, and surrounded by thickets of flowers. Six Ionic columns supported the roof, and the single door was of bronze. A splendid marble group of "The Fates" stood before the door, the work of a young American sculptor, Boris Yvain, who had died in Paris when only twenty-three years old.

For those who don't know their historic New York City geography, Washingon Square South between Wooster Street and Fifth Avenue South is the exact location of Bobst Library.

Happy Halloween!

I love The Chatterbox! It is one of my favorite sources for nineteenth-century creepy babies and images of kittens and puppies.

Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night.

The Fales Library has always had excellent holdings of Gothic fiction -- from The Castle of Otranto (1765) on down, all the major (and many minor) writers of the 18th and 19th centuries can be found on our shelves. What might not be so well-known is that we have outstanding holdings in contemporary Gothic fiction as well.

One great place to start one's explorations of late-20th-century Gothic writing is this volume: The New Gothic: A Collection of Contemporary Gothic Fiction.

This volume appeared in 1991, edited by Bradford Morrow and Patrick McGrath. It is full of writers whose works are collected in depth here in Fales: Jamaica Kincaid, Lynne Tillman, Joyce Carol Oates, Angela Carter, Brad Morrow, Peter Straub, Kathy Acker, and William T. Vollman.

About ten years later, Peter Straub was invited to serve as guest editor for an issue of the journal Conjunctions. He produced this excellent volume in 2002: Conjunctions 39: The New Wave Fabulists.

This collection collects even more names to be found filling the Fales stacks: John Crowley, Kelly Link, Jonathan Lethem, and Elizabeth Hand. In addition to the brief "Guest Editor's Note," this volume includes essays from two of the most thoughtful observers of contemporary gothic/fantastic/science fiction/fabulism -- Gary K. Wolfe and John Clute. Definitely required reading for anyone trying to get their mind around contemporary Gothic fiction.

While we're on the subject of John Clute and theorizing horror, one really must read his book The Darkening Garden: A Short Lexicon of Horror (2006) -- available in Fales, of course.

Other notable anthologies of recent years include Paraspheres: Extending Beyond the Spheres of Literary and Genre Fiction - Fabulist and New Wave Fabulist Stories (2004) and The Apocalypse Reader (2007). Both anthologies include plenty of authors who have long been collected in Fales -- Brian Evenson, Dennis Cooper, Rick Moody, Lynne Tillman, and on and on.

The latest addition to this growing body of anthologies is Poe's Children: The New Horror (2008)

This volume is also edited by Peter Straub and includes a wonderful mix of writers, almost all of whom are well-represented in the Fales Library. Dan Chaon, Elizabeth Hand, Brian Evenson, Kelly Link, John Crowley, Thomas Tessier, and more. Straub's sometime-collaborator Stephen King is also included in this collection and I am pleased to say Fales holds a complete set of King's works from Carrie (1974) through his latest story collection, Just After Sunset (2008).

Capping it all off, Fales is now home to the personal papers of Peter Straub himself. The collection is currently being processed and will soon be available to researchers. It is as complete an archive as one could hope for: full of notes and multiple drafts of all of his works (published and unpublished); extensive correspondence with agents, authors, and friends; photos; contracts; and much more.

Next: Looking Backward: The Not Quite As New Gothic