Oh, Those Orange Novels

The name Erastus Beadle won’t mean much to many until it’s clear this is THE Beadle of the Beadle Dime Novels. Erastus was a New York publisher of songbooks who changed course in 1860 and launched a mass-produced series of dime novels that became a runaway success. The books, originally published on orange paper, told fanciful and romantic stories about the west, glorifying the life and struggles. How successful was he? In his first five years, he sold more than five million dime novels. And to this day, some want to believe the Beadle version of the old west is the way it really was!