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April 12, 2006
Nancy Drew's Father - Part 4
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." The sheer number of books that Stratemeyer produced meant that he had more leverage with publishers (he worked with several, and would move from one to another when dissatisfied) than the average author, and could better orchestrate his distribution efforts among their salesmen. He pushed cost-averse publishers to invest in a higher number of illustrations per book, and in better covers. 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.
None of Stratemeyer's innovations would have mattered had he not known what kids wanted to read about - "that touch in them that gets boys." The Stratemeyer fifty-center was an adventure story aimed at children between the ages of ten and sixteen; it assumed that kids, like adults, were captivated by technology of the twentieth century, and generally, tried to keep up with trends in adult fiction. Stratemeyer had, in his own prankish way, the muscle memory of children's enthusiasm for novelty. "The trouble is that very few adults get next to the heart of a boy when choosing something for him to read," he wrote in a letter to a publisher in 1901. "A wide awake lad has no patience with that which is namby-pamby, or with that which he puts down as a "study book" in disguise. He demands real flesh and blood hereos who do something."
Stratemeyer's heroes - among them the Motor Boys, the Outdoor Girls (the first girls' series, Dorothy Dale, was introduced in 1908), the Motion Picture Chums, Tom Swift, and the Bobbsey Twins - dashed about in six-cylinder racing cars or jets or balloons. "Swift by name and swift by nature" was Tom Swift's motto. Most strikingly, Stratemeyer abandoned the model of self-improvement that informed both Alger's and Patten's best-sellers. His children were already perfect - solidly middle-class "Ubermenschen", as one syndicate partner later termed them. "Manly" and "wide awake," they succeeded at whatever they turned their hand to and enjoyed utter freedom (in contrast to "firmly guarded" nineteenth-century types), typically exposing the schemes of ne'er-do-wells hoping to siphon away the fortune of an innocent orphan. Stratemeyer understood that twentieth-century children wanted a fantasy posing as reality. As Patten aptly put it, the new model was a story about "the boy that every kid would like to be. Not, mind you, the boy that every kid ought to be. That was the Horatio Alger idea."
Stratemeyer was a micromanager. During the syndicate's golden years, Stratemeyer, who lived in Newark with his wife and two daughters, would arrive in his Manhatten office at nine every morning, dictate two chapters, and then fire off a series of letters to publishers. No detail was too minor to escape his attention; once, while preoccupiedwith an important business deal, he noticed that a publisher had sent him a cover on which a Japanese life preserver bore an English name printed in tiny type, and immediately sent of a letter requiring a correction. He repeatedly accused his publishers of laziness and indifference to the success of his books, yet he had that particular gift for caustic woundedness that made other people want to do more for him. At the end of the most cutting of letters, he would sign his name in a spidery fashion, as if to suggest that his naive enthusiasm had been dealt a great blow. In an early letter to W.F. Gregory, an editor at Lothrop, Lee & Shepard, he practiced this to great effect:
Dear Mr. Gregory,
I received yesterday the package of books and have looked the two volumes over with interest. I think "The Fort in the Wilderness" is exceedingly good . . . I wish I could say as much for "Dave Porter" but I cannot. To me the pictures are poor and will do the book more harm than good. Every one of them lacks life and action. The race on the ice is tame and the knock-down blow in the gym simply awful. And what life is there in the automobile scene? I suggested lots of good things - the feast, the "rough house", the boys on the run-away trolley, the serio-comic initiations, etc. but none were used. Some day when I feel rich I am going to ask you to put in two or three new pictures at my expense.
We don't know if Stratemeyer ever felt rich, but certainly by 1920 he was rich. His books were sold in the tens of millions of copies. His writers were still struggling to make a living - they knew that the syndicate could dispose of them at any time - but he was enjoying the fruits that came to the chairman of any successful company.
To Be Continued
Posted by mysterygamers at April 12, 2006 11:29 PM