Category: Text, Illustration, New York

Street & Smith Dime Novel Covers Brief History of Street & Smith  In 1855, when Francis Scott Street and Francis Shubael Smith bought The New York Weekly Dispatch , Street & Smith embarked on a publishing mission that remained remarkably prolific and profitable for over one hundred years. Street & Smith rapidly became a "fiction factory," producing a wide variety of popular literature, including dime novels, pulp magazines, books in series for juveniles, fashion and homemaking magazines, comics, and adventure stories. The company viewed fiction as a commodity, with Street & Smith editors dictating plots, character types, and other conventions to the firm's stable of writers.