As Union and Confederate forces warred on the battlefields in 1863, a battle of a different kind raged among dime novel publishers. Irwin Beadle, who had co-founded the Beadle Publishing House with his brother Erastus, broke with his brother and established a rival publishing house with George Munro. Irwin left the business shortly thereafter, leaving George Munro the head of a burgeoning publishing house which was fiercely competitive with that of Erastus Beadle.
In 1870, George Munro's brother, Norman, in turn founded a publishing house to rival that of his brother. A former Beadle employee, Norman Munro was interested in detective stories and achieved great success with the publication of Old Cap Collier Library, a series featuring the adventures of an ingenious, aging sleuth. The Houses of Munro and Beadle enjoyed great commercial success until the early 1900s when the popularity of dime novels declined, replaced by the cheaper "nickel libraries.