Villains Galore: The Heyday Of The Popular Story Weekly - Mary Noel (The Macmillan Company, 1954).No copyright renewals found.The chapters have been bookmarked in the PDF for ease of access.From the dust jacket:"In this exciting history of the low-priced weeklies, Mary Noel shows how they developed, and how, by paying high prices to authors and furnishing a steady market, they first made the writing of light fiction a regular business."From a Kirkus Reviews review, June 15, 1954:"Villains Galore: The Heyday Of The Popular Story Weekly provides an historical romp for journalists and students of American literature, or of advertising for that matter. The birth and the flowering of the weekly family story papers brought popular literature to the Victorian millions as they liked it -- burdened with sweetness and violence. From the 1830's papers began their climb, cribbing as they went, with bigness their advertised virtue. By the 1850's, the first fiction hacks had appeared and were boosted by such men as Bonner, the great showman and owner of the "New York Ledger." The comic advertising schemes, the battles of rival papers to outdo each other with alliteratively named authors and engrossing serials are a large part of the story. Mrs. Southworth, story queen; Sylvanus Cobb, the story paper story ideal who wrote ""decently sensational"" serials and squibs; firm Fanny Fern who despite the primness of the period praised Walt Whitman; Horatio Alger and dozens of other authors are recalled. We are treated to some lurid purple prose in a work historical in tone but light of heart, nevertheless for a somewhat specialized market."About The Author:Mary Noel was educated at Radcliffe and Columbia University. She was the author of Villains Galore (Macmillan, 1954), about the era of the popular story weekly, and taught history at the Polytechnic Institute, San German, Puerto Rico. She was also the author of the article "Dime Novels," which appeared in the February 1956 issue of American Heritage.