Via The New Yorker, a new long-dead hero to add to the Pantheon: Edward Stratemeyer: The father of Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, the Bobbsey Twins, Tom Swift and countless others. The Bobbseys were my entry into the world of obsessive reading, circa age five: In a fit of edutainual largesse, my Grandfather purchased the entire hardback series for me in an afternoon. (The Hardys were deemed too edgy.)
I'd known for years that these books were formula-written by stringers, but I knew nothing of their svengali until reading this excellent profile. Sure, we're not talking searing insights into the human condition here, but they got/get kids to read, which is a key first step. And as a cultural phenomenon? Harry Potter is a small-time two-bit street urchin:
In 1926, ninety-eight per cent of the boys and girls surveyed in a poll published by the American Library Association listed a Stratemeyer book as their favorite.
And that was before the Hardys and Nancy Drew.
I'll confess, I feel some kinship with old Ed, at least as he's profiled in this article:
He weaved together common ideas, capitalizing on a precipitous moment:
Stratemeyer’s timing was superb. The spread of primary education had spawned a host of independent young readers, and juvenile fiction was on the verge of becoming hugely popular. The dime novel, which had emerged in 1860, had created an appetite among children for more exciting fare than Sunday-school moralism. What Stratemeyer brought to this burgeoning market was not literary brilliance; the early Rover Boys books are crudely written at best. But he had two essential gifts: a knack for coming up with ideas, and organizational genius. As Henry Ford was revolutionizing the auto industry, Stratemeyer was revolutionizing the way children’s books were produced. The boy who had played at the printing press had learned how to put his single-mindedness to work for him.
His niche marketing methods were ahead of their time. Think what this guy could have done with email!:
Through the first years of the century, Stratemeyer and his publishers engaged in an epic publicity effort that included buying up lists of children’s names and addresses, circulating a catalogue of books, and seizing every chance to cross-promote his books. Each series volume, for instance, contained a paragraph plugging the volume preceding it and the volume to come, known as the “throw-ahead.” ... And he kept looking for ways to expand his readership. In 1910, the formation of the Boy Scouts of America meant an open line to Stratemeyer’s core audience. Immediately, he began a series about Boy Scouts, to the dismay of Scoutmasters, who complained, according to the Fortune reporter, that boys were turning up their noses at “mundane” tasks like tracking woodchucks.
He had to fight the incumbent media (here, literature) for position, even to the point of censorship:
Even as Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys were invading children’s bookshelves, there was one place you couldn’t find them: the library. The Stratemeyer Syndicate came under attack from educators and librarians from the start. As early as 1914, Franklin K. Mathiews, the chief librarian for the Boy Scouts of America, published a damning article, “Blowing Out the Boy’s Brains,” about series fiction. “Parents who buy such books think they do their boys no harm. The fact is, however, that the harm done is simply incalculable,” he argued. The series books would “debauch and vitiate” a child’s imagination. Early on, librarians condemned the syndicate’s series as tawdry, sensationalist work taking children away from books of moral or instructional value. Decades later, some educators began to argue that the books were a stepping-stone to more sophisticated literature, a way to get kids reading in the first place.
Ed's methods democratized and improved the process, to the chagrin of the old guard. In this context, look at single authors as the incumbent media and the "manufacturers" as Citizen Journalists or bloggers. Same topsy-turvy quality arguments as today:
Mathiews assumed, rightly, that the very word “manufactured” would make people squirm with distaste. But Stratemeyer’s assembly-line method surely made his series better, not worse. The rapid rate at which the syndicate was producing fiction allowed Stratemeyer to learn from his mistakes more swiftly, making his series more sophisticated than many of the series penned by individual authors. Furthermore, when it came to refining a catchy story, two heads often proved to be better than one.
Even in the early nineteen hundreds, frequency mattered:
Stratemeyer realized that the way to move books was to keep them constant. The “manufactured” nature of the series was curiously reassuring to kids, who felt that there was an endless supply of goods they knew and liked coming their way. Children, of course, love repetition, as any parent who’s had to watch “Finding Nemo” ten times knows. But so do adults. The hardest thing about selling what economists call “experience goods”—like books or movies—is persuading people to try something they can’t be sure they’ll like. That’s why a handful of brand-name fiction writers (often writing books with continuing characters) dominate the best-seller lists and the shelves of airport bookstores: in some way they’re a known quantity. As the Stratemeyer Syndicate grew, a snowball effect could be seen: the more books that appeared in any given series, the more children bought them, confident that supply would not run out.
And most importantly, shows how over the decades, the inherent biases that create problems for the publishing industry, haven't changed much at all.
Ultimately, Edward Stratemeyer was a conventional-minded businessman with a radical idea that would not have been radical in any other industry. It was to give his customers, who happened to be children, what they wanted, not what he thought they should want—and to make a product that was better than his competitors’. He understood, as George Orwell later wrote, that there was such a thing as the “good bad book”—one that “has no literary pretensions but remains readable when more serious productions have perished.”
Oh, yeah. And the van was cool too. 
Comments