This month Stanford Libraries is launching a collaborative project to expand access to our extensive holdings of American dime novels from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Dime novels, which flourished in the United States in the second half of the 19th century and the early 20th century, featured an ever-evolving array of popular fiction genres: frontier stories modeled on the work of James Fenimore Cooper, detective stories, westerns, romances, sports stories. Widely read in their day, dime novels provided cheap fiction for an expanding reading public. Today, many dime novels are in particularly fragile condition due to the cheap nature of the paper used in their production, and collections are spread across the country with few institutions holding complete runs of major dime novel series.