Both the publishers and Edward Stratemeyer knew that the biggest sales for juvenile series books occurred between Thanksgiving and Christmas.
To help ensure that young readers and adult buyers of the books were thinking of his products, he worked with the publishers to print small folded brochures that listed the books written by Edward and especially the Syndicate series. He shared printing and mailing costs with the publishers for these and they were sent out right after Thanksgiving.
Addresses for the envelopes were secured from a variety of sources, including magazines for youth and even home paint companies. Letters would be rented from sources and the names and addresses were transcribed onto the envelopes.
Sometimes Stratemeyer’s niece, Anna Stratemeyer, was hired by him to address the envelopes. In these, pamphlets (Stratemeyer always spelled this “pamplets”) were stuffed from several publishers. A given recipient might receive catalogs from four publishers in a given year.
Sometimes two versions of catalogs were prepared. Some of these had considerably more pages and content than others.
In 1911 Stratemeyer tried to be more elaborate in his mailings and a booklet with review-like summaries of Syndicate books were prepared as by “John Tupper Brownell” called Safe and Sane Books for Boys and Girls. Since Stratemeyer prepared the text for this, it is not at all surprising that the summaries were positive.
In general, however, most mailings sent out to prospective readers and buyers were similar to the three panels shown from a larger Grosset & Dunlap pamphlet from the 1910s seen below.
