The Stratemeyer Syndicate was the producer of a number of mystery series for children, including Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, the various Tom Swift series, the Bobbsey Twins, the Rover Boys, and others.
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History
Created by Edward Stratemeyer, the Stratemeyer Syndicate was the first book packager to have its books aimed at children, rather than adults. The Syndicate was wildly successful; at one time it was believed that the overwhelming majority of the books children read in the USA were Stratemeyer Syndicate books, based on a 1922 study of over 36,000 children country-wide.
Stratemeyer's business acumen was in realizing that there was a huge, untapped market for children's books. At a time when most children's books were aimed at moral instruction, the Stratemeyer Syndicate specialized in producing books that were meant primarily to be entertaining. In Stratemeyer's view, it was not the promise of sex or violence that made such reading attractive to children; it was the thrill of feeling grown-up and the desire for a series of stories. Stratemeyer believed that this desire could be harnessed for profit. He founded the Stratemeyer Syndicate to produce books in an efficient, assembly-line fashion and to write them in such a way as to maximize their popularity.
The first series that Stratemeyer created was the Rover Boys, published under the pseudonym Arthur M. Winfield. The Rover Boys books were a roaring success - a total of 30 volumes were published between 1899 and 1926, selling over five million copies. The Bobbsey Twins first appeared in 1904 under the pseudonym Laura Lee Hope, and Tom Swift in 1910 under the pseudonym Victor Appleton.
Stratemeyer published a number of books under his own name, but the books published under pseudonyms sold better. Stratemeyer realized that "he could offer more books each year if he dealt with several publishers and had the books published under a number of pseudonyms which he controlled." Stratemeyer explained his strategy to a publisher, writing that "[a] book brought out under another name would, I feel satisfied, do better than another Stratemeyer book. If this was brought out under my own name, the trade on new Stratemeyer books would simply be cut into four parts instead of three."
Some time in the first decade of the twentieth century Stratemeyer realized that he could no longer juggle multiple volumes of multiple series, and he began hiring ghostwriters, such as Howard Garis and Leslie McFarlane. Stratemeyer continued to write some books, while writing plot outlines for others.
While mystery elements were occasionally present in these early series, the Syndicate later specialized in children's mystery series. This trend was begun in 1911, when Stratemeyer wrote and published The Mansion of Mystery, under the pseudonym Chester K. Steele. Five more books were published in that mystery series, the last in 1928. These books were aimed at a somewhat older audience than his previous series. After that, the Syndicate focused on mystery series aimed at its younger base: the Hardy Boys, which first appeared in 1927, ghostwritten by Leslie McFarlane and others; and Nancy Drew, which first appeared in 1930, ghostwritten by Mildred Wirt Benson, Walter Karig, and others. Both series were immediate financial successes.
In 1930, Stratemeyer died, and the Syndicate was inherited by his two daughters, Harriet Stratemeyer Adams and Edna Stratemeyer Squier. Stratemeyer Squier sold her share to her sister Harriet within a few years. Harriet Stratemeyer introduced such series as The Dana Girls (1934), Tom Swift, Jr., The Happy Hollisters, and many others. In the 1950s, Harriet began substantially revising old volumes in the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys series, updating them by removing references to outdated cultural elements, such as "roadster". Racial slurs and stereotypes were also removed, and in some cases (such as The Secret of Shadow Ranch and The Mystery at the Moss-Covered Mansion) entire plots were cast off and replaced with new ones. In part, these changes were motivated by a desire to make the books more up-to-date; however, Grosset & Dunlap, the primary publisher of Stratemeyer Syndicate books, requested that the books' racism be excised, a project that Adams felt was unnecessary. Grosset & Dunlap, however, held firm; they had received an increasing number of letters from parents who were offended by the stereotypes present in the books, particularly in the Hardy Boys publications.
In the late 1970s, Adams decided it was time for Nancy and the Hardys to go into paperback, as the hardcover market was no longer what it had been. However, Grosset & Dunlap sued, citing "breach of contract, copyright infringement, and unfair competition". The ensuing case let the world know, for the first time, that the Syndicate existed; the Syndicate had always gone to great lengths to hide its existence from the public and ghostwriters were contractually obliged never to reveal their authorship.
Grosset & Dunlap was awarded the rights to the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys volumes that they had published, but the Syndicate was judged free to take subsequent volumes elsewhere. Subsequent volumes were published by Simon & Schuster.
Adams died in 1982. In 1987, Simon & Schuster purchased the syndicate from its partners - Edward Stratemeyer Adams, Camilla Adams McClave, Patricia Adams Harr, Nancy Axelrod and Lilo Wuenn - and turned to Mega-Books, a book packager, to handle the writing process for new volumes.
Writing guidelines
All Stratemeyer Syndicate books were written under certain guidelines, based on practices Stratemeyer began with his first series, the Rover Boys.
Criticism of Syndicate books
For decades, libraries refused to carry any Syndicate books, considering them to be unworthy trash. Series books were considered to "cause 'mental laziness,' induce a 'fatal sluggishness,' and 'intellectual torpor.'" Series books were considered to ruin a child's chances for gaining an appreciation of good literature (which was subsequently shown by one study to not be the case), and to undermine respect for authority: "much of the contempt for social conventions … is due to the reading of this poisonous sort of fiction."
Franklin K. Mathiews, chief librarian for the Boy Scouts of America, wrote that series books were a method, according to the title of one of his articles, for "Blowing Out the Boys' Brains," and psychologist G. Stanley Hall articulated one of the most common concerns by asserting that series books would ruin girls in particular by giving them "false views of [life]… which will cloud her life with discontent in the future."
None of this hurt sales, however; Stratemeyer was unperturbed, even when his books were banned from the Newark Public Library as early as 1901, writing to a publisher: "Personally it does not matter much to me. … Taking them out of the Library has more than tripled the sales in Newark."
Foreign Publications
Some syndicate series' were also reprinted in foreign countries. The first appearance seems to be the first Ted Scott Flying Stories book, published in Germany in the early 1930s as Ted Scott Der Ozeanflieger. The artwork was always changed when reprinted in other countries, and sometimes character names were as well. Other series reprinted outside the States include Nancy Drew, The Dana Girls, The Hardy Boys and the Bobbsey Twins(Australia, France, Norway, Sweden, UK). These other series first appeared around the 1950s outside the States.
The second Stratemeyer Syndicate series to be re-printed outside the United States appears to have been the first two books in the Don Sturdy series, although an exact date of printing is unknown. Only two Don Sturdy books were printed in Britain (the other being The Desert of Mystery). Two British forms of The Big Snake Hunters are known to exist, both printed by The Children's Press, one from the 1930s and another with different cover art from the 1950s.