Word: fad
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Along with the pulp books, Street & Smith built pulp magazines (Ainslee's, Top Notch, etc.), which kept going when the penny-dreadful fad passed. Some, like Western Story, still have a cozy 400,000 circulation. They have followed every change in public taste from the Western plains to the sea, to the air, to cops & robbers, and back to cowboys. At the crest, when it sold 95 million magazines and pulps a year, S. & S. had a stable of such writers as Upton Sinclair (who wrote under the name of Ensign Clark Fitch, U.S.N.), Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton...
Scientific Inhumanity. But about the worst menace to children, in Dr. Bakwin's opinion, is the fad for incarcerating them in hospitals. To begin with, he thinks that, in spite of some advantages, a hospital is a poor place for a child to be born in: 1) there is little evidence that hospital delivery has reduced maternal or infant deaths; 2) it exposes the newborn infant to hospital-prevalent diseases (notably diarrhea) and the scientific inhumanity of doctors and nurses. Separating the baby from its mother at birth, instead of allowing it to be cuddled and breastfed...
Best-sellers have sometimes ridden the crest of a fad, sometimes have been the stone that set the avalanche in motion. Linen dusters fluttered along U.S. highways in 1905, and in their back draft C.N. and A.M. Williamson, specialists in vapid romances of the open road, whose heroines invariably fell for their chauffeurs (all princes in disguise), were swept on to the best-seller list with their The Princess Passes. In 1923 a slim volume with a top-heavy title, Self-Mastery through Conscious Auto-Suggestion, had Americans everywhere murmuring, "Every day in every way, I am getting better...
Stars & Stripes turned an angry soldier's eye on "the psychoneurosis fad which is sweeping the country and which is based on the belief that every returning veteran is maladjusted...
...plaintive ballad about the man who dared ask a wartime waiter for one meat ball is fast becoming a fad with U.S. bobby-soxers. The adolescents have no idea how old-fashioned they are: their latest musical hero was well known to Boston in the 1850s. Almost a century ago, a shy Harvard Latin professor named George Martin Lane tried to buy a single fish ball in a restaurant, heard his piddling order bellowed out by a surly waiter...