Beadle's Half Dime Library No. 31

This issue of Beadle's Half Dime Library features "Keen-Knife," a frontier adventure by Oll Coomes. The cover illustration depicts a Native American figure with a knife and rifle, rendered in sharp wood-engraved lines typical of 1870s pulp printing. At five cents, these weekly papers serialized action narratives—westerns, Indian scouts, pirates, and outlaws—that established the visual and narrative conventions later inherited by adventure comics. Beadle's dominated the dime-novel market for decades, reaching working-class readers with affordable entertainment that prioritized plot and spectacle over literary refinement.