It was a sorry day for silverfish when the late P.J. Moran's family cleaned out his attic. The Oakland postal inspector had stashed away more than 7,000 dime novels, boys' magazines and weekly "story papers" dating back 100 years and more. In 1995 the Stanford Libraries acquired his collection, which dwarfed its previous holdings in this genre.
Why would a university want bales of crumbling newsprint -- mostly whodunits, Wild West yarns, swashbuckling adventures and romances? The answer lies not so much in the literary merit of works like California Joe, The Mysterious Plainsman or Dime Ladies Letters as in what they reveal about American cultural history. Advances in printing technology, distribution and literacy rates allowed dime novels and weekly story newspapers to reach an unprecedented mass audience -- 400,000 in the case of some tabloids. By studying the old story lines and illustrations, scholars can gain insight into the tastes, values and stereotypes of ordinary people from Civil War days into the early 20th century.
Curators faced a double challenge with the collection: preserve its brittle pages yet make them widely accessible. Each item had to be slipped into a plastic sleeve and kept in an acid-free box. "It's a space-intensive collection," says librarian John Mustain. But thanks to scanning technology and the Internet, visitors to Stanford's dime novel website (www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/dp/pennies) can read nine different stories in their entirety, view more than 2,300 images and recover a fascinating chapter in publishing history -- without disturbing a page.
