This article draws on a careful study of series fiction read in the 1950s to explore how stereotypes feature in the development of a young reader's competence in learning to process stories in print. Five categories of stereotype are teased out: "embodied stereotypes," understood through physical experience; "working stereotypes," discerned through reading and then put to use over and over again in successive textual encounters; "recurring stereotypes" that appear in one book after another; "transient stereotypes" that are simply never remembered; and "subliminal stereotypes" that linger unvisited in the mind.