Erastus Flavel Beadle

Erastus Flavel Beadle (September 9, 1821 – December 18, 1894) was an American printer and pioneer in publishing pulp fiction.

Erastus was born in Otsego County, New York, United States, in 1821, and had a brother, Irwin Pedro Beadle (1826-1882), who assisted him in various business undertakings.

Erastus worked for a miller named Hayes, where he began his printing career when cutting wooden letters to label bags of grain.

He married Mary Ann Pennington (d.1889) in 1846,[1] and in 1847 the couple moved to Buffalo, New York, where Erastus worked as a stereotyper.

[5] In 1860, after finally settling down in Brooklyn, Irwin came with an idea to publish, first, ten-cent booklets, and then, a series of paper-covered novels at the same price, which brought him recognition and commercial success.

[5] At the beginning of the twentieth century, in July 1907, Charles M. Harvey, a critic, changed the prevailing attitudes after publishing in the Atlantic Monthly a reflective piece titled, The Dime Novel in American Life.

Many of the boys and girls who encountered Pontiac, Boone, the renegade Girty, Mad Anthony, Kenton, and Black Hawk in their pages were incited to find out something more about those characters and their times, and thus were introduced to much of the nation’s story and geography.

His younger brothers William and David Adams in 1866 went into business with Irwin Beadle, who in 1868 made his final retirement from publishing.

[15]In the 1870s, the series "Lives of Great Americans" presented biographies of Ethan Allen, Daniel Boone, Kit Carson, Davy Crockett, Ulysses S. Grant, John Paul Jones, Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, Abraham Lincoln, Israel Putnam, Pontiac, Tecumseh, George Washington, and Anthony Wayne.

[15] Although other publishers had attempted to sell cheap books before, Beadle and Adams revolutionized the field of cheap fiction by drastically lowering the price to a mere ten centers when other books were selling for a dollar or a dollar and half.

In order to make a profit selling the books so cheaply, Beadle & Adams used several cost cutting strategies.