The Marketing of Emma-Lindsay Squier
as a Girls' Series Book Writer
Jessica Amanda Salmonson
The advertisment shown at the left is for the works of Emma-Lindsay Squier as reprinted in a "set" by the World Syndicate Publishing Company of Cleveland, Ohio. It was run on the back panel of some of their dustwrappers, in this case on the back of a copy of Annie Roe Carr's Nan Sherwood at Rose Ranch, which was more definitively a book in a "series," there having been five novels about the adventures of schoolgirl Nan Sherwood. But in Emma-Lindsay's case, the first editions of her story collections as issued by Cosmpolitan Books weren't marketed as essentially young adult. The tales were not about young protagonists, let alone girl protagonists. But Emma-Lindsay's "family-worthiness" had been noted even before she was repackaged for young readers, & there was certainly nothing untoward about marketing these to young adults. But as a "Series"?
Marketing then as now had its own rationales. In reissuing Emma-Lindsay's books for young adults, certain marketing decisions had to be made. With such a pretty name as Emma-Lindsay, it seemed fate that hers would be categorized as girls' books. When Mildred Wirt wrote boys' books, she used a male pseudonym. Edith Jane Craine wrote both boys' & girls' books, so she used only her initials, E. J. Craine being all-purpose. There were exceptions to the rule but not many. Boys' series books had male authors, girls series books had female authors, even if as sometimes happened they were all actually written by, say, Howard Garis.
The protagonists in Emma-Lindsays stories weren't mostly female, but could still be collectively entitled the Girls Adventure Series if "Girls" referred to the target audience rather than to the stories' characters. And the books are at least "Adventures" of one or another sort. In terms of really being a "Series" one might have considered the two volumes of animal tales a two-book series. And the two volumes of folklorish fantasies of the Native Americas could be a separate two-book series (with a third serialized in Good Housekeeping never having had any book edition). But with a single author, & an adventurous tone, they might by a long stretch be regarded in total to be a four-book set.
World Syndicate was not alone in this marketing approach. While a girls' book series was generally considered something akin to Nancy Drew books having recurring characters & similar plot ideas, there were innumerable boys' books & girls' books "series" that were trumped up from miscellaneous books. The inside flap of the same book from which the Emma-Lindsay Squier ad was taken has an advertisement for "The Heroine Series" which is five books by five authors with nothing in common but female characters in the stories, not always the protagonists. This "series" consisted of Elsie Wright's Patty & Jo, Detectives about twins who solve the mystery of the missing guardian; H. R. Jorgenson's The Red Lacquer Case a juvenile spy story with super-science & a plucky girl protagonist; James A. Cooper's Cap'n Jonah's Fortuna & Tobias an omnibus of Cape Cod sea stories; Edgar Wallace's collection of detective tales Nig-Nog & lastly Robert W. Hamilton's Belinda of the Red Cross a World War I tale of a nurse on the French battlefields. There were even more boys' sets from several publishers, given overtitles demanding these unrelated books be regarded as of one or another given series.
In some cases such "forced" series were given dustwrappers or bindings with artwork in common, or some other packaging detail that tagged the given grouping as a single get-them-all set. In World Syndicate's packaging of Emma-Lindsay Squier, however, they retained the dustwrapper artwork from the first editions provided by Cosmopolitan Books. These are great jackets all around & it's easy to imagine the decision-making process at World Syndicate: Pay someone for a new design that might not be as nice as the ones Cosmpolitan provided as part of the whole package, or go with the established dustwrappers. Thus nothing about this "series" if held in one's hand immediately identifies them as of a kind except that they were all reprinted by World Syndicate. The only thing that proves them to have been a series at all was the publishers' ad campaign.
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