Dime Novel - Collections

Collections

In the late 1940s to the early 1950s, collecting dime novels became very popular, and prices soared. Albert Johannsen authored an enormous two volume scholarly work, The House of Beadle & Adams, which is exhaustive in its detail. Even at that time the cheap publications were crumbling into dust and becoming hard to find. William J. Benners was another of the early historians of the dime novel. He was also a publisher and author. Edward T. LeBlanc, a longtime editor of the periodical Dime Novel Round-Up, was also an avid collector and bibliographer of the format. Two of the prominent collectors, Charles Bragin and Ralph Cummings, issued a number of reprints of particularly hard to find titles from some of the weekly libraries.

• Library of Congress through copyright deposit has accumulated a collection of nearly 40,000 titles.
• Stanford University has a collection of over 8,000 individual dime novels, and a web site devoted to the subject.
• The University of Minnesota's Hess Collection has a collection of over 65,000 dime novels, among the largest in North America.
• The University of South Florida-Tampa Special Collections Department has an extensive collection of nearly 9,000 dime novels, including Frank Tousey's the Frank Reade Library and the Frank Reade Weekly Magazine.
• Rare Books and Special Collections at Northern Illinois University holds over 50,000 dime novels in its Johannsen and LeBlanc Collections. While much of NIU's collection is not fully cataloged, the novels are accessible to users.]
• 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 now available online.
• NYU's Fales Library 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. William J. Benners was a writer and publisher of dime novels. Link to the Fales Library guide to the Ralph Adimari Papers Link to the 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.