page_title: Dime novel
section_title: Collections
hierarchical_section_title: Dime novel / Collections
caption_attribution_description: English: Cover of The Liberty Boys Running the Blockade, by Harry Moore - April 7 1922
context_page_description: The dime novel is a form of late 19th-century and early 20th-century U.S. popular fiction issued in series of inexpensive paperbound editions. The term dime novel has been used as a catchall term for several different but related forms, referring to story papers, five- and ten-cent weeklies, "thick book" reprints, and sometimes early pulp magazines. The term was used as a title as late as 1940, in the short-lived pulp magazine Western Dime Novels. In the modern age, the term dime novel has been used to refer to quickly written, lurid potboilers, usually as a pejorative to describe a sensationalized but superficial literary work.
context_section_description: In the late 1940s and early 1950s, collecting dime novels became popular, and prices soared. Even at that time, the cheap publications were crumbling into dust and becoming hard to find. Two collectors, Charles Bragin and Ralph Cummings, issued a number of reprints of hard-to-find titles from some of the weekly libraries.
  The Library of Congress through copyright deposit has accumulated a collection of nearly 40,000 titles.
  The University of Minnesota's Hess Collection has a collection of over 65,000 dime novels, among the largest in North America.
  Northern Illinois University's Rare Books and Special Collections holds over 50,000 dime novels in its Johannsen and LeBlanc Collections. More than 7,000 volumes from these collections have been digitized and made freely available online through Nickels and Dimes.
  Villanova University's Dime Novel and Popular Literature Collection was established in 2012 when the collection of Charles Moore Magee was rediscovered in storage. This formed the seed around which a larger collection was grown through acquisitions and donations from scholars. Much of the collection has been digitized and is available online through Villanova University's Digital Library.
  Stanford University has a collection of over 8,000 individual dime novels and a website devoted to the subject.
  The University of South Florida–Tampa Special Collections Department has a collection of nearly 9,000 dime novels, including Frank Tousey's Frank Reade Library and the Frank Reade Weekly Magazine.
  The Edward G. Levy Dime Novel Collection is housed at the Fales Library at New York University. A complete finding aid to the collection is available online.
  The Fales Library at New York University also houses the Ralph Adimari Papers and the William J. Benners Papers. Adimari was a historian who studied dime novels. His papers include research notes, clippings, and ephemera related to dime novels. Benners was a writer and publisher of dime novels. Fales Library guide to the Ralph Adimari Papers. Fales Library guide to the William J. Benners Papers.
  The University of Missouri, Columbia, houses a small collection of dime novels in its Division of Special Collections, Archives and Rare Books
  Brandeis University's Archives & Special Collections Department has a collection of dime novels and juvenile literature dating from 1805 to 1979. A preliminary container list is now available online.
  The Texas Collection at Baylor University has a collection of nearly 350 dime novels from 1861 to 1919.
  The Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin houses a collection of 212 of Beadle's dime novels.  The collection can be viewed here.
  The Athenaeum of Philadelphia holds a small collection of dime novels  (11 boxes) that were collected by the Rev. Roland Sawyer and donated by Roland D. Sawyer, Jr. It includes substantial runs of Beadle's Dime Library and Beadle's Half Dime Library and smaller numbers of Deadwood Dick Library and other titles.
  Syracuse University Libraries holds a collections of Street and Smith novels and the records of the publishers.
caption: Cover of The Liberty Boys Running the Blockade, by Harry Moore, in The Liberty Boys of '76, April 7, 1922
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