It’s the birthday of Edward Stratemeyer (1862-1930), prolific author of children’s books and the founder of Stratemeyer Literary Syndicate, which brought out a number of wildly popular children’s series and changed the world of children’s publishing.

Stratemeyer was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, to German immigrants; his father was a tobacconist. Stratemeyer had a printing press as a teenager and sold his first story to a boys’ magazine at 26. He wrote more and more stories and became an editor at Good News, where in 1898 he had the opportunity to finish writing a Horatio Alger story which Alger was too ill to complete. In fact, Stratemeyer finished several Alger stories after Alger died, then went on to create The Rover Boys, an adventure series about three brothers, and then The Motor Boys, which he brought out in clothbound hardcover for 50 cents: half the cost of most hardcover books for children, but more “respectable” looking than the dime novels so popular then. This strategy sold millions of books. (This article here is very informative on all this.)

To keep up with the growing demand for his stories, Stratemeyer hired ghostwriters. He’d send them the outline of a new book—sketching out the plot, characters, setting, etc.—and they’d turn it around in a month. He checked each one for consistency and add a few stylistic touches. The book was then published under the pseudonym chosen for that series, a pseudonym that Stratemeyer owned. Among the series he created were the Motion Picture Chums, the adventures of a group of boys who took exciting moving pictures, back when that was exciting; Tom Swift, science fiction/adventure; the Bobbsey Twins, featuring the adventures of a family with two sets of fraternal twins; and then in 1926 the enormously popular Hardy Boys, which chronicled the adventures of teen detectives Frank and Joe Hardy. Nancy Drew followed in 1930 and outsold even the Hardy Boys.

Shortly after launching Nancy Drew, Stratemeyer came down with pneumonia and died of a heart attack. His daughters took over the syndicate and gradually decreased the number of series being published; one daughter, Harriet Stratemeyer Adams, ended up writing many of the Nancy Drews herself. Harriet also updated the Nancy Drew books beginning in 1959. Harriet died in 1982, and in 1984, Simon & Schuster acquired the syndicate, bringing out their own edgier updated version, The Nancy Drew Files, in 1986.

Fun fact: for many years, Nancy Drew books were banned from libraries. Books that existed purely to entertain children, without being morally uplifting, were viewed suspiciously by librarians in the olden days. (Librarians. Am I right?)

What’s the best book of sheer entertainment you’ve ever read? Discuss.

Have a highly entertaining Thursday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.