[A front page illustration from the New York Ledger published July 15, 1893. The artist's signature, "Hugh M. Eaton," appears on the lower left, and the engraver's signature, "J. Clement," on the lower right]

The Artist

The Artist Dime novels and story papers were filled with sensational, melodramatic narratives, and it was the job of the artist to convey the suspense and drama of these stories in visual form. Working for little pay and driven by tight deadlines, the artists churned out bold, attention-grabbing illustrations that summed up the spirit and essence of each story, often in a single, telling image.

Because the artist typically read a bare minimum of each story before illustrating it, the majority of dime novel and story paper illustrations depict scenes from a story's first few chapters. In the early days of the dime novel, publishers would hire artists to produce original illustrations for each story. As time went on, however, publishers began to recycle illustrations, taking images from one story and using them to illustrate completely different stories in an effort to keep costs down. This meant that authors were often presented with an illustration and told to write a story around a pre-existing image. Such 'image recycling' became an accepted and widespread practice among dime novel publishers.

Most dime novel and story paper illustrations were left unsigned by the artist as well as the engraver who reproduced the image for publication. This was standard practice for book and magazine publishing of the time. Occasionally, however, one does find artists' and engravers' signatures, particularly on the lavish, front-page illustrations of story papers such as Banner Weekly, New York Ledger, and New York Family Story Paper.

The Printing Process

The graphic layout of dime novels and story papers differ considerably. Dime novels generally consist of one full-page illustration on the front cover, with one main story inside. Until 1870 or so, this cover image would have been in black and white, but by the 1880s the technology for color reproduction had advanced to the stage where color imagery had become the norm. Story papers, the early forerunners of today's newspapers, contain a variety of stories and news items in multiple columns. Each story paper has a front cover illustration of varying size in black and white, and often there are additional illustrations throughout the issue.

Once the artist produced the desired illustration, the task then became how to reproduce the image for mass publication. The method of reproduction depended on several variables: the medium of the original image, whether the image would be reproduced in black and white or color, and where the illustration would run in the issue (on the front cover or on the inside pages). While the decision on how to reproduce a simple cartoon illustration might be an easy one--the logical choice would be a line block, choosing a print process for a large and important illustration would have been more complicated; the image could be reproduced by engraving or a halftone relief process.

Dime novels were enormously popular, and it was not unusual for publishers to print tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of issues. Neither wood blocks nor metal plates could withstand such extended print runs. This necessitated an additional printing step known as electrotyping, in which an exact duplicate of the wood block or metal plate was produced by electrolysis. By the later nineteenth century, wood-engravings published in books and magazines were almost always printed from electrotypes (or later, galvanotypes) of the blocks. Keep in mind, particularly when browsing through the Dime Novel Features Database, that although many of the images are listed as wood-engravings or halftones, they would actually have been printed from electrotypes.

The final reproduction process, one which nineteenth and early twentieth century publishers could scarcely have imagined, is the transmission of the dime novel imagery to digital form for viewing on this web site. This process necessitated numerous decisions about image resolution, file size and transmission rate, all of which have affected the way you now view the illustrations on your screen.

[Black & White | Color | Bibliography]