Series Fiction Then and Now

The past few years have seen an unprecedented upsurge of popular interest in children's series fiction. This should come as no surprise, given the current nostalgia boom and its effect on the market for collectibles. Those who were children between the 1940s and the 1960s now look back fondly on the entertainment of their youth, and with curiosity about even earlier series that their parents may have read. New magazines for collectors have sprung up, such as the Mystery and Adventure Series Review (begun in 1974) and the Yellowback Library (begun in 1980), which focus on twentieth-century series more recent than the pulps discussed in the venerable Dime Novel Round-Up, now in its fifty-eighth year. Aficionados of girls' series—particularly the Judy Bolton books of Margaret Sutton—founded a group called the Phantom Friends, with their own monthly magazine and annual meetings; on a more ambitious scale, general readers of juvenile series fiction have held conventions at the University of Wisconsin in La Crosse in 1984 and at Corning, New York, in 1986.

Most of the hobbyists involved in collecting or writing about series books are not academics, or if so, not literary scholars, and much of their prose has a fanzine quality. At the same time, their research serves a real need in filling the vacuum of information created by decades of silence from the establishment about these books. That is, until recently, most librarians and educators looked askance at modern juvenile series, with a few distinguished exceptions, such as the works of L. Frank Baum, Laura Ingalls Wilder, or C. S. Lewis. To be sure, they no longer recoiled with horror, as did Franklin K. Mathiews, in his influential and notorious 1914 article "Blowing Out the Boy's Brains," which attacked series books as "overstimulating." In language reminiscent of nineteenth-century warnings against masturbation, Mathiews portrayed the juvenile imagination as a precious essence that could be depleted with dire effect: "Story books of the right sort stimulate and conserve this noble faculty, while those of the viler and cheaper sort, by over-stimulation, debauch and vitiate, as brain and body are debauched and destroyed by strong drink."¹

More customarily, professional educators saw series books as harmless diversion of no literary merit—mass-produced escapism that was ipso facto unfit for preservation on library shelves (the same shelves, it should be remarked, which were so full of escapist genre fiction of all sorts for adults). As a result, for decades the best-selling series books led a kind of underground existence, unreviewed and unremarked by all save the children who devoured them voraciously and purchased them in quantities far beyond those of the respectable award-winning trade volumes they were supposed to enjoy.

Nowhere was this more the case than with the books produced by the Stratemeyer Syndicate, the world's most successful juvenile fiction factory. Founded by Edward Stratemeyer around 1904 or 1906 (depending on your source), the Syndicate had produced some 1300 titles with total sales of 200 million volumes by the mid-1980s. Stratemeyer was an astonishingly prolific writer, producing over 100 hardcover boys' books—not to mention a host of magazine serials and story papers—before he hit upon the idea of farming out plots for his series to other writers to complete for a fixed fee. By the time of his death in 1930, Stratemeyer had written about 200 volumes and outlined and edited another 800. Under the efficient direction of his daughter, Harriet Stratemeyer Adams (1889-1982), the Syndicate continued to churn out an enormous number of juvenile books: 125 series in all, issued by 38 U.S. publishers and translated into 14...