WI: No Stratemeyer Syndicate

asnys

Edward Stratemeyer was the mostly unknown genius who created Tom Swift, the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, the Rover Boys, and the Bobbsey Twins, among numerous others. He operated a sort of fiction factory, the Stratemeyer Syndicate, analogous to the Dumas group (or Tom Clancy today), and was ultimately responsible for over 800 books, of which he wrote about 150 himself. All of the characters, however, were his own invention, and he usually wrote at least the first book in each series.

What if Stratemeyer stayed with his stationary shop and never got into writing? What are the consequences of no Tom Swift, no Nancy Drew, no Hardy Boys?
 

David S Poepoe

Banned
I think children's fiction would still get a huge boost with the publication of L.F. Baum's The Wizard of Oz, so I would consider that there would be a delayed identification that the young adult literature market existed.
 

keeline

In addition to making an online searchable database of time travel literature, some of which falls under AH (http://www.TimeTravelLit.com), I make a specialty of collecting and researching the works of Edward Stratemeyer (1862-1930) and His Stratemeyer Syndicate (1905-1985).

I spotted this question on Sunday morning with a Google News alert for Stratemeyer and indeed I have thought about this question before in some detail.

Edward was an amateur writer and printer in the mid 1870s while he was still in school. Despite this, his father, some 46 years older than he, was doubtful that Edward could make a career from writing. Ten years after his graduation from high school Edward was 26 and his father was 72 in the early months of 1889 when he made his first professional sale of a long serial to Golden Days, a Philadelphia weekly story paper that was established by James Elverson in 1880. The $75 he received impressed his father and he stated to his son that if they were going to pay that for writing a story, he should write a lot more for them. Stratemeyer wrote several more stories for this periodical and others and then eased into book publications (beginning with reprints of his serials) in 1894. In 1898 he started to write specifically for book publication.

Stratemeyer tried to buy back the book rights for this first long (20,000 words) serial story, "Victor Horton's Idea," as well as the others he wrote for Golden Days but Elverson would not sell them back even after the publication folded. After Elverson died, his son wouldn't sell the stories either. Hence, Stratemeyer was never able to reuse this material in other story papers or in book form as they were or updated as he had with the works that appeared elsewhere.

This is one of the reasons why I decided to publish Victor Horton's Idea as an annotated illustrated book on Lulu, something Stratemeyer could not do himself.

Even without the Syndicate, Stratemeyer's writing career was extensive and influential. About 160 of his personally-written stories were published as books. The most successful of these series was the Rover Boys (1899-1926) as by "Arthur M. Winfield." By 1934 more than 5 million copies of these books had been sold. These were best sellers for that period.

The original post mentions that Stratemeyer usually wrote the first volume in each of the series. This is an old myth. He did so in only two occasions. He wrote the first Bobbsey Twins book for publication in 1904. In 1907 the second title was published as a Syndicate production. He also wrote a serial story that became the first Dave Fearless story. Later volumes were Syndicate productions where ghostwriters worked from his outlines. He maintained complete control and ownership of the stories, series, pseudonym and characters. The hired writers were paid promptly a sum equivalent to two months' wages as a newspaper reporter, their most common "day job", for their four-weeks of "moonlighting."

What is true is that the publishers with whom Stratemeyer worked wanted more and more material. It was greater than he could write on his own. The Syndicate was the natural outgrowth of this. The idea was used before (Dumas) and since then (Tom Clancy, Clive Cussler, etc.).

Where Edward wrote 160 stories published as books (and many more for periodicals), his Syndicate produced about 1,400 books between 1905 and 1985. These included some popular and influential books such as Tom Swift, Bomba the Jungle Boy, the Hardy Boys, and Nancy Drew.

The original question concerned what sort of changes we might see in a world where Edward Stratemeyer remained a clerk in one of the family tobacco stores. He did briefly run a stationery store in Newark in the first half of 1890 but he did not write "Victor Horton's Idea" there. It was written at home in 1888. Other stories were written in his brother's (Maurice's) tobacco and music store or his own store for the brief period when he had it. In November 1914 he opened an office in Manhattan off Madison Square Park so he could be closer to the offices of most of the publishers who handled his books.

The 19th century world of juvenile literature was dominated by authors like "Harry Castlemon," Horatio Alger Jr. and "Oliver Optic" in the U.S. and G.A. Henty, W.H.G. Kingston, and Mayne Reid in the U.K. Although the Alger and "Optic" (William T. Adams) books were sometimes grouped into publisher series, they did not have continuing characters in the way we think of series books today. There were some examples such as the Frank series by "Castlemon" (Charles A. Fosdick) and the Elsie Dinsmore series by "Martha Finley" (Martha Farquharson) but these were exceptions. Stratemeyer was among the early writers to popularize the use of a group of characters or a single character so that story after story could be told about them so long as the demand required more.

One of the main areas of influence from Syndicate books was in the form of other writers who read the series as youths and went on to write other things. For example, authors like Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Robert A. Heinlein, and Clive Cussler read the Tom Swift series and were inspired to write fantastic stories as a result. Indeed, the existence of semi-realistic science fiction stories such as the Tom Swift series (1910-1941) and the Verne-like Great Marvel series (1906-1935) for young people created a large market for the first pulp sci fi magazines from Hugo Gernsback such as Amazing Stories in a way that few others would have done.

An explicit goal of the Tom Swift series about a young inventor was to inspire the readers to enter into careers that embraced engineering and aviation. There are many people who read the more than 6 million copies sold by 1934 who did just that. The series was popular enough that it was revived in the form of a Tom Swift Jr. series (1954-1971) of 33 volumes which was even more successful since it was available for the Baby Boom Generation. Readers of these books who cite Tom Swift Jr. as being influential into their career choices include people like Steve Wozniak and Bill Gates. Numerous astronauts and NASA workers have also named Tom Swift (of either generation) as influential. Chuck Yeager was a youthful reader of Tom Swift.

There is also the well-known story of the TASER being named for Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle (1911) even though the design is actually based on an underwater electric gun from a Great Marvel volume, Under the Ocean to the South Pole (1907).

In other classes of literature, reread To Kill a Mockingbird and notice the influence of the Seckatary Hawkins books (by Robert F. Schulkers, not the Syndicate), the Rover Boys, and Tom Swift on the childhoods of the characters. Harper Lee has stated her appreciation for these books. Joseph Heller (Catch 22) also mentioned Tom Swift as an inspiration. Many examples can be found. George Lucas and Steven Spielberg have also been influenced by Stratemeyer series, especially Tom Swift.

Nancy Drew has been a role model for independent young women. The current Secretary of State and the women on the U.S. Supreme Court name Nancy Drew as a major influence on them. The list of prominent people inspired by this character is a long one.

In addition to the readers, there are other writers who worked for Stratemeyer at one time or another and they went on to write other things which have been enjoyed. The Syndicate often hired young writers with relatively little publishing experience and over the years of working with the Syndicate, their technique improved. Upon Edward Stratemeyer's death in May 1930, several of his writers thanked the family for the apprenticeship and guidance he offered to them.

The Stratemeyer Syndicate series included many successes (and some failures too) and their success inspired competitors in the form of other writers and publishers to issue similar material. So even if one thinks that Judy Bolton (by Margaret Sutton), Rick Brant (mostly by Hal Goodwin), or Ken Holt (by Sam & Beryl Epstein) are better than their Syndicate counterparts, the fact that publishers like Grosset & Dunlap were even issuing books of this type was due to Stratemeyer starting to work with them in 1908 and the success they obtained with them.

Not only would childhood reading have been affected, but key people who were inspired by reading these books might have done things differently and perhaps not entered the fields for which they are now famous.
 

Orville_third

Banned
It should be noted that some of the works of the previous generation cited (Henty, "Oliver Optic" and "Martha Finley") are being promoted today by Dominionist groups such as Vision Forum. Perhaps without Stratemyer, some children's fiction could be considered more moralistic, thus leadig to a more restrictive culture?
 

DaleCoz

There were a number of competitors/imitators of the Stratemeyer Syndicate books over the year, many of them quite good. The Leo Edwards books (Jerry Todd, Poppy Ott) were very popular in the twenties and thirties, and in their own way pretty good. Earlier, the Mark Tidd books were often quite good. The books written under the pen name Irving Hancock in the 1911 to maybe 1920 followed heroes like Dick Prescott and Dave Darin from their grammar school days into the armed forces and finally into a fictional future German invasion of the US (Invasion of the United States series)

Post World War II, the Rick Brant stories sort of competed with Tom Swift Jr, though they were more tied to real then current technology, while Ken Holt, the Three Investigators and others competed in the young detective realm. Judy Bolton competed with Nancy Drew for many years, and was very popular.

I think that the idea of series books was going to come--certainly they became common in the adult realm, with Tarzan, John Carter, Doc Savage, Fu Manchu, the Saint, etc. Extending them to the young adult area was an obvious idea, and it would have happened with or without the Syndicate.

Based on the books that actually competed with the Stratemeyer series, I suspect that young adult series books would have been more tied to time and place without the Syndicate. That would have limited their longevity, but maybe made them speak to the particular generation they were aimed at more effectively. They would have also died when their authors retired, unless someone else did the Stratemeyer Syndicate thing.

The Rick Brant series illustrates the strength and weaknesses of the non-Stratemeyer series books. They were almost all written by the same author, a well-traveled guy (Harold Goodwin) who had actually been most of the places he sent his characters. He knew current science and technology and extrapolated near term possible advances well. That all made the stories timely, but it also dated them as the series went on: Transistors as the next big thing, American adventurers traveling to Tibet without having to deal with the Chinese Communist regime. And eventually, after 23 books in 23 years, the series ended.
 

keeline

H(arrie) Irving Hancock was the name of a real person. He had been a journalist and author of dime novels and story paper fiction before he began to compete with the Syndicate around 1910. The publisher, Altemus of Philadelphia, had exchanged letters with Stratemeyer to obtain proposals for new series he could supply to them. They did not come to terms and he had to ask that his idea sheets be returned. Needless to say, he was not happy when Altemus announced their new series which were similar to Syndicate products using Hancock and Frank G. Patchin. The latter person sometimes wrote under pseudonyms owned by the publisher.

Another example was a group of series published by Hurst around 1911-12 under several pseudonyms with most or all of the boys' books written by a newspaper journalist named John Henry Goldfrap.

Using multiple pen names helped the Syndicate and men like Goldfrap and Patchin issue more books in a given year than the market would normally accept.

These low-priced series were created specifically in response to the Syndicate books, even if the existence of the Syndicate was not widely known at the time. When the Syndicate was issuing books under more than a dozen pen names for 4 or 5 publishers, it made it seem as if there were many people and publishers suddenly offering these low-priced books that were selling well. Publishers like Altemus and Hurst who were not working with Stratemeyer would be sufficiently motivated to compete with them.

Mark Tidd was by Clarence Buddington Kelland and the stories first appeared in magazines like American Boy. When published they were issued in an expensive form by Harper & Bros., well beyond the budgets of most families. A modern analogy would be to ask how many $30 books parents buy for their 10-year-old children, knowing that they'll read them in a day or two. Some may but many won't.

Edward Edson Lee who wrote the "Leo Edwards" books was a reader of the Rover Boys and Tom Swift stories. A few years after the books started to come out, Lee corresponded with Stratemeyer and they exchanged signed copies of one of their books apiece.

I don't know whether Goodwin or the Epsteins read any Syndicate books but they cannot help but have been aware of them and the potential market for them. Their books were a little early for the market since the main block of readers in the 1950s were the Baby Boom Generation, being born mainly from 1946 to 1952. Hence, with Rick Brant starting in the early 1940s and Ken Holt in the late 1940s, they were a little early. The main thrust of sales were concentrated from 1956 to 1962. After that, television became a significant competition with more color sets and youth programming.

Margaret Sutton (born Rachel Beebe) was aware of Nancy Drew and the early draft MS of the first story mentions the character reading "all the Nancy books".

Grosset & Dunlap was already in a position where they did not want to rely on a single source, the Stratemeyer Syndicate, for their juvenile list. Hence, in the 1920s they began to find individual writers like Lee and Sutton to provide additional sources of fiction.

The early books (before WWII) had advertisement pages after the story that included both Syndicate and non-Syndicate series issued by the publisher. As the number of pages decreased, it made sense that they Syndicate would want that space to promote their own items. On the jackets it was common for non-Syndicate series to be advertised. However, when jackets were dropped in the early 1960s, the space for promoting other series was all but eliminated. This, coupled with the reduced demand as Boomers grew up and television competed, caused the sales of all of the series books to go down. Also, as the series became longer, it was a decision for booksellers to decide which would sell best for the limited space they could allocate.

One of the biggest influences was an agreement between Stratemeyer and G&D to lower the royalty he received from 5% to 4% or from 2.5¢ per copy to 2¢ per copy. The individual writers were still being paid 5% even though the books sold at the same rate. Hence, the G&D sales force had a financial incentive to push the Syndicate books more than the others. G&D would not flinch on this 4% royalty rate for decades even though Harriet Adams made repeated attempts to renegotiate the terms.

Without the Syndicate offering books at cheap prices through several publishers and building a market for these books in the 1905-1915 period, I think that many of the books which were similar in nature would have been more like Mark Tidd, expensive books read by only some children and not popular to the degree we see.

It might be a stretch, but other author's books which fall into series like Tolkien, Lewis, and even Rowling might not have done as well without the reader training received by children from reading books from the Syndicate and their immediate competitors at the same price level.
 
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