CHATTERBOX COVERS
Cupples & Leon – New York
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The natural inheritors of L.C. Page & Company, Cupples & Leon published Chatterbox in the US for just a few years from 1930. When the UK owners of Chatterbox transferred the rights to Dean & Son (London) in 1936, no-one in the US seemed keen to follow and the American version of Chatterbox came to an end soon after. Cupples and Leon was founded in 1902 by an Englishman and a German, and grew to be the biggest comic book publisher for the early decades of the 20th century. Cupples and Leon were book salesmen casting about for an opportunity to make real money. They saw the firms of Altemus in Philadelphia, Donohue in Chicago, Grosset & Dunlap and A.L. Burt in New York selling juveniles at whatever price struck their fancy, all the way from $1.25 to twenty-five cents. Cupples & Leon were visited by Edward Stratemeyer, and from that meeting came a juvenile costing fifty cents but looking as if it were worth much more. The adolescent public at once decided that here was the place to get your money's worth. It did not take the other publishers long to follow Cupples' lead. Burt and Grosset, who had popular writers on their lists, rose merrily with them to opulence. Doubters like Donohue and Altemus slipped slowly but surely from the juvenile field. Today virtually all fifty-centers are published by the Big Three - Grosset, Burt, and Cupples. Grosset is the biggest reprint publisher, and fifty-centers account for one-third of its business. Cupples does no reprinting, but is second largest publisher of fifty-centers. Burt, third in fifty-cent ranking, concentrates today on reprint fiction. How much money these firms have made from fifty-centers is their secret, and they hold on to it tenaciously. Cupples compiled a colossal list of children's names. Included on the jacket of each of its books was a coupon which, when filled out with the names and addresses of ten friends, entitles the whole group to Cupples illustrated catalogue. The catalogue was an insidious narcotic with the habit forming properties of opium. In it were printed fetching bits from the more popular series. Cupples estimates that all in all 500,000 names have been on that list. When the age of adolescent reading discretion began dropping from sixteen to fourteen, the increasingly rapid turnover of these names made the list too expensive to keep up-to-date. Cupples & Leon now issues a dollar omnibus book in which is included the first volume of four fifty-centres. This aperitif is just as effective as the catalogue. Such a volume presents, among other things, the best means of reviving a series that has dropped out of the adolescent eye. |
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Chatterbox Vol.63 |
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Chatterbox Vol. 64 |
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Chatterbox Vol. 68 |
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