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Pulp magazine

January 26, 2023

Pulp magazines (also referred to as "the pulps") were inexpensive fiction magazines that were published from 1896 to the late 1950s. The term "pulp" derives from the cheap wood pulp paper on which the magazines were printed. In contrast, magazines printed on higher-quality paper were called "glossies" or "slicks". The typical pulp magazine had 128 pages; it was 7 inches (18 cm) wide by 10 inches (25 cm) high, and 0.5 inches (1.3 cm) thick, with ragged, untrimmed edges.

The pulps gave rise to the term pulp fiction in reference to run-of-the-mill, low-quality literature. Pulps were the successors to the penny dreadfuls, dime novels, and short-fiction magazines of the 19th century. Although many respected writers wrote for pulps, the magazines were best known for their lurid, exploitative, and sensational subject matter, even though this was but a small part of what existed in the pulps. Successors of pulps include paperback books, digest magazines, and men's adventure magazines. Modern superhero comic books are sometimes considered descendants of "hero pulps"; pulp magazines often featured illustrated novel-length stories of heroic characters, such as Flash Gordon, The Shadow, Doc Savage, and The Phantom Detective.

History

Origins

The first "pulp" was Frank Munsey's revamped Argosy magazine of 1896, with about 135,000 words (192 pages) per issue, on pulp paper with untrimmed edges, and no illustrations, even on the cover. The steam-powered printing press had been in widespread use for some time, enabling the boom in dime novels; prior to Munsey, however, no one had combined cheap printing, cheap paper and cheap authors in a package that provided affordable entertainment to young working-class people. In six years, Argosy went from a few thousand copies per month to over half a million.[1]

Street & Smith, a dime novel and boys' weekly publisher, was next on the market. Seeing Argosy's success, they launched The Popular Magazine in 1903, which they billed as the "biggest magazine in the world" by virtue of its being two pages (the interior sides of the front and back cover) longer than Argosy. Due to differences in page layout however, the magazine had substantially less text than Argosy. The Popular Magazine did introduce color covers to pulp publishing, and the magazine began to take off when in 1905 the publishers acquired the rights to serialize Ayesha, by H. Rider Haggard, a sequel to his popular novel She. Haggard's Lost World genre influenced several key pulp writers, including Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, Talbot Mundy and Abraham Merritt.[2] In 1907, the cover price rose to 15 cents and 30 pages were added to each issue; along with establishing a stable of authors for each magazine, this change proved successful and circulation began to approach that of Argosy. Street and Smith's next innovation was the introduction of specialized genre pulps, with each magazine focusing on a particular genre, such as detective stories, romance, etc.[3]

 
Cover of the pulp magazine Spicy Detective Stories vol. 2, #6 (April 1935) featuring "Bullet from Nowhere" by Robert Leslie Bellem

Peak of popularity

At their peak of popularity in the 1920s–1940s,[4] the most successful pulps sold up to one million copies per issue. In 1934, Frank Gruber said there were some 150 pulp titles. The most successful pulp magazines were Argosy, Adventure, Blue Book and Short Stories, collectively described by some pulp historians as "The Big Four".[5] Among the best-known other titles of this period were Amazing Stories, Black Mask, Dime Detective, Flying Aces, Horror Stories, Love Story Magazine, Marvel Tales,[6] Oriental Stories, Planet Stories, Spicy Detective, Startling Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories, Unknown, Weird Tales and Western Story Magazine.[6]

During the economic hardships of the Great Depression, pulps provided affordable content to the masses, and were one of the primary forms of entertainment, along with film and radio.[4]

Although pulp magazines were primarily an American phenomenon, there were also a number of British pulp magazines published between the Edwardian era and World War II. Notable UK pulps included Pall Mall Magazine, The Novel Magazine, Cassell's Magazine, The Story-Teller, The Sovereign Magazine, Hutchinson's Adventure-Story and Hutchinson's Mystery-Story.[7] The German fantasy magazine Der Orchideengarten had a similar format to American pulp magazines, in that it was printed on rough pulp paper and heavily illustrated.[8]

World War II and market decline

 
 
 
Pulp magazines began to decline during the 1940s, giving way to paperbacks, comics and digest-sized novels.

During the Second World War paper shortages had a serious impact on pulp production, starting a steady rise in costs and the decline of the pulps. Beginning with Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine in 1941, pulp magazines began to switch to digest size; smaller, thicker magazines. In 1949, Street & Smith closed most of their pulp magazines in order to move upmarket and produce slicks.[9]

Competition from comic-books and paperback novels further eroded the pulps’ marketshare, but it was the widespread expansion of television that sounded the death knell of the pulps.[4] In a more affluent post-war America, the price gap compared to slick magazines was far less significant. In the 1950s, men's adventure magazines began to replace the pulp.

The 1957 liquidation of the American News Company, then the primary distributor of pulp magazines, has sometimes been taken as marking the end of the "pulp era"; by that date, many of the famous pulps of the previous generation, including Black Mask, The Shadow, Doc Savage, and Weird Tales, were defunct.[1] Almost all of the few remaining pulp magazines are science fiction or mystery magazines now in formats similar to "digest size", such as Analog Science Fiction and Fact and Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. The format is still in use for some lengthy serials, like the German science fiction weekly Perry Rhodan (over 3,000 issues as of 2019).

Over the course of their evolution, there were a huge number of pulp magazine titles; Harry Steeger of Popular Publications claimed that his company alone had published over 300, and at their peak they were publishing 42 titles per month.[10] Many titles of course survived only briefly. While the most popular titles were monthly, many were bimonthly and some were quarterly.

The collapse of the pulp industry changed the landscape of publishing because pulps were the single largest sales outlet for short stories. Combined with the decrease in slick magazine fiction markets, writers attempting to support themselves by creating fiction switched to novels and book-length anthologies of shorter pieces. Some ex-pulp writers like Hugh B. Cave and Robert Leslie Bellem moved on to writing for television by the 1950s.

Genres

Pulp magazines often contained a wide variety of genre fiction, including, but not limited to,

The American Old West was a mainstay genre of early turn of the 20th century novels as well as later pulp magazines, and lasted longest of all the traditional pulps. In many ways, the later men's adventure ("the sweats") was the replacement of pulps.

Many classic science fiction and crime novels were originally serialized in pulp magazines such as Weird Tales, Amazing Stories, and Black Mask.

Notable original characters

While the majority of pulp magazines were anthology titles featuring many different authors, characters and settings, some of the most enduring magazines were those that featured a single recurring character. These were often referred to as "hero pulps" because the recurring character was almost always a larger-than-life hero in the mold of Doc Savage or The Shadow.[11]

Popular pulp characters that headlined in their own magazines:

Popular pulp characters who appeared in anthology titles such as All-Story or Weird Tales:

Illustrators

Pulp covers were printed in color on higher-quality (slick) paper. They were famous for their half-dressed damsels in distress, usually awaiting a rescuing hero. Cover art played a major part in the marketing of pulp magazines. The early pulp magazines could boast covers by some distinguished American artists; The Popular Magazine had covers by N.C. Wyeth, and Edgar Franklin Wittmack contributed cover art to Argosy[12] and Short Stories.[13] Later, many artists specialized in creating covers mainly for the pulps; a number of the most successful cover artists became as popular as the authors featured on the interior pages. Among the most famous pulp artists were Walter Baumhofer, Earle K. Bergey, Margaret Brundage, Edd Cartier, Virgil Finlay, Frank R. Paul, Norman Saunders, Emmett Watson, Nick Eggenhofer, (who specialized in Western illustrations), Hugh J. Ward, George Rozen, and Rudolph Belarski.[14] Covers were important enough to sales that sometimes they would be designed first; authors would then be shown the cover art and asked to write a story to match.

Later pulps began to feature interior illustrations, depicting elements of the stories. The drawings were printed in black ink on the same cream-colored paper used for the text, and had to use specific techniques to avoid blotting on the coarse texture of the cheap pulp. Thus, fine lines and heavy detail were usually not an option. Shading was by crosshatching or pointillism, and even that had to be limited and coarse. Usually the art was black lines on the paper's background, but Finlay and a few others did some work that was primarily white lines against large dark areas.

Authors and editors

Another way pulps kept costs down was by paying authors less than other markets; thus many eminent authors started out in the pulps before they were successful enough to sell to better-paying markets, and similarly, well-known authors whose careers were slumping or who wanted a few quick dollars could bolster their income with sales to pulps. Additionally, some of the earlier pulps solicited stories from amateurs who were quite happy to see their words in print and could thus be paid token amounts.[15]

There were also career pulp writers, capable of turning out huge amounts of prose on a steady basis, often with the aid of dictation to stenographers, machines or typists. Before he became a novelist, Upton Sinclair was turning out at least 8,000 words per day seven days a week for the pulps, keeping two stenographers fully employed. Pulps would often have their authors use multiple pen names so that they could use multiple stories by the same person in one issue, or use a given author's stories in three or more successive issues, while still appearing to have varied content. One advantage pulps provided to authors was that they paid upon acceptance for material instead of on publication; since a story might be accepted months or even years before publication, to a working writer this was a crucial difference in cash flow.

Some pulp editors became known for cultivating good fiction and interesting features in their magazines. Preeminent pulp magazine editors included Arthur Sullivant Hoffman (Adventure),[16] Robert H. Davis (All-Story Weekly), Harry E. Maule (Short Stories),[17] Donald Kennicott (Blue Book), Joseph T. Shaw (Black Mask), Farnsworth Wright (Weird Tales, Oriental Stories), John W. Campbell (Astounding Science Fiction, Unknown) and Daisy Bacon (Love Story Magazine, Detective Story Magazine).[18]

Authors featured

Well-known authors who wrote for pulps include:

Sinclair Lewis, first American winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, worked as an editor for Adventure, writing filler paragraphs (brief facts or amusing anecdotes designed to fill small gaps in page layout), advertising copy and a few stories.[19]

Publishers

 
Cover of the pulp magazine Dime Mystery Book Magazine, January 1933

Legacy

The term pulp fiction is often incorrectly used for massmarket paperbacks since the 1950s. The Browne Popular Culture Library News noted:

Many of the paperback houses that contributed to the decline of the genre–Ace, Dell, Avon, among others–were actually started by pulp magazine publishers. They had the presses, the expertise, and the newsstand distribution networks which made the success of the mass-market paperback possible. These pulp-oriented paperback houses mined the old magazines for reprints. This kept pulp literature, if not pulp magazines, alive. The Return of the Continental Op reprints material first published in Black Mask; Five Sinister Characters contains stories first published in Dime Detective; and The Pocket Book of Science Fiction collects material from Thrilling Wonder Stories, Astounding Science Fiction and Amazing Stories.[20] But note that mass market paperbacks are not pulps.

In 1991, The Pulpster debuted at that year's Pulpcon, the annual pulp magazine convention that had begun in 1972. The magazine, devoted to the history and legacy of the pulp magazines, has published each year since. It now appears in connection with PulpFest, the summer pulp convention that grew out of and replaced Pulpcon. The Pulpster was originally edited by Tony Davis and is currently edited by William Lampkin, who also runs the website ThePulp.Net. Contributors have included Don Hutchison, Robert Sampson, Will Murray, Al Tonik, Nick Carr, Mike Resnick, Hugh B. Cave, Joseph Wrzos, Jessica Amanda Salmonson, Chet Williamson, and many others. [21]

In 1992, Rich W. Harvey came out with a magazine called Pulp Adventures reprinting old classics. It came out regularly until 2001, and then started up again in 2014.[22]

In 1994, Quentin Tarantino directed the film Pulp Fiction. The working title of the film was Black Mask,[23] in homage to the pulp magazine of that name, and it embodied the seedy, violent, often crime-related spirit found in pulp magazines.

In 1997 C. Cazadessus Jr. launched Pulpdom, a continuation of his Hugo Award-winning ERB-dom which began in 1960. It ran for 75 issues and featured articles about the content and selected fiction from the pulps. It became Pulpdom Online in 2013 and continues quarterly publication.

After the year 2000, several small independent publishers released magazines which published short fiction, either short stories or novel-length presentations, in the tradition of the pulp magazines of the early 20th century. These included Blood 'N Thunder, High Adventure and a short-lived magazine which revived the title Argosy. These specialist publications, printed in limited press runs, were pointedly not printed on the brittle, high-acid wood pulp paper of the old publications and were not mass market publications targeted at a wide audience. In 2004, Lost Continent Library published Secret of the Amazon Queen by E.A. Guest, their first contribution to a "New Pulp Era", featuring the hallmarks of pulp fiction for contemporary mature readers: violence, horror and sex. E.A. Guest was likened to a blend of pulp era icon Talbot Mundy and Stephen King by real-life explorer David Hatcher Childress.

In 2002, the tenth issue of McSweeney's Quarterly was guest edited by Michael Chabon. Published as McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, it is a collection of "pulp fiction" stories written by such current well-known authors as Stephen King, Nick Hornby, Aimee Bender and Dave Eggers. Explaining his vision for the project, Chabon wrote in the introduction, "I think that we have forgotten how much fun reading a short story can be, and I hope that if nothing else, this treasury goes some small distance toward reminding us of that lost but fundamental truth."

The Scottish publisher DC Thomson publishes "My Weekly Compact Novel" every week.[24] It is literally a pulp novel, though it does not fall into the hard-edged genre most associated with pulp fiction.[citation needed]

From 2006 through 2019, Anthony Tollin's imprint Sanctum Books has reprinted all 182 DOC SAVAGE pulp novels, all 24 of Paul Ernst's AVENGER novels, the 14 WHISPERER novels from the original pulp series and all but three novels of the entire run of THE SHADOW (most of his publications featuring two novels in one book).[25]

In 2021 Dave Martel started to release issues of Bizarchives which is a publication of modern day pulp fiction and weird tales.

See also

References

  1. ^ a b "A Two-Minute History of the Pulps", in The Adventure House Guide to the Pulps, edited by Doug Ellis, John Locke, and John Gunnison. Silver Spring, MD, Adventure House, 2000. (p. ii–iv).
  2. ^ See Lee Server, Encyclopedia of Pulp Fiction Writers (2002), pg.131.
  3. ^ Reynolds, Quentin. The Fiction Factory ; Or, From Pulp Row to Quality Street: The Story of 100 Years of Publishing at Street & Smith. Random House, 1955. (Covers: Street & Smith, Nick Carter, Max Brand, Buffalo Bill, Frank Merriwell, Gerald Smith, Richard Duffy, Frederick Faust, dime novel, Horatio Alger, Henry Ralston, Ned Buntline, Ormond Smith, Beadle's, Edward Stratemeyer, detective fiction, Laura Jean Libbey, Astounding Science Fiction, Edith Evans)
  4. ^ a b c "Pulp Illustration: Pulp Magazines – Illustration History". www.illustrationhistory.org. Retrieved January 22, 2020.
  5. ^ Hulse, Ed. (2009) "The Big Four (Plus One)" in The Blood 'n' Thunder Guide to Collecting Pulps. Murania Press, ISBN 0-9795955-0-9 (pp. 19–47).
  6. ^ a b Server, Lee (1993). Danger Is My Business: an illustrated history of the Fabulous Pulp Magazines. San Francisco: Chronicle Books. pp. 62–65. ISBN 978-0-8118-0112-6.
  7. ^ a b Ashley, Michael (2006). The Age of the Storytellers: British Popular Fiction Magazines, 1880–1950. British Library. ISBN 1-58456-170-X
  8. ^ "Orchideengarten, Der". in: M.B. Tymn and Mike Ashley, Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Weird Fiction Magazines. Westport: Greenwood, 1985. pp. 866. ISBN 0-313-21221-X
  9. ^ Ashley , Michael. The history of the science-fiction magazine: the story of the science-fiction magazines from 1950 to 1970, Transformations, Volume 2 (2005), pg. 3 ISBN 978-0-85323-779-2
  10. ^ Haining, Peter (1975). The Fantastic Pulps. Vintage Books, a division of Random House. ISBN 0-394-72109-8.
  11. ^ Hutchison, Don (1995). The Great Pulp Heroes. Mosaic Press. ISBN 0-88962-585-9.
  12. ^ Hulse, Ed (2009). The Blood 'n' Thunder Guide to Collecting Pulps. Muriana Press. pp. 26, 163. ISBN 978-0979595509.
  13. ^ Robinson, Frank M., and Davidson, Lawrence. Pulp Culture – The Art of Fiction Magazines. Collectors Press, 2007. ISBN 1-933112-30-1 (p.42).
  14. ^ The Adventure House Guide to the Pulps, edited by Doug Ellis, John Locke, and John Gunnison. Silver Spring, MD, Adventure House, 2000. (p. xi–xii).
  15. ^ John A. Dinan, Sports in the Pulp Magazines. McFarland, 1998, ISB0786404817 (pp. 130–32).
  16. ^ Bleiler,Richard "Forgotten Giant: Hoffman’s Adventure". Purple Prose Magazine, November 1998, p. 3-12.
  17. ^ Sampson,Robert.(1991) Yesterday's Faces:Dangerous Horizons Popular Press, 1991, (p.87).
  18. ^ Locke, John ed. “Editors You Want to Know: Daisy Bacon” by Joa Humphrey in Pulpwood Days: Editors You Want to Know. Off-Trail, 2007. ISBN 0-9786836-2-5 (p. 77). Daisy Bacon (1899?–1986) was nicknamed "Queen of the Woodpulps".
  19. ^ Schorer, M. Sinclair Lewis: An American Life, pp. 3–22. McGraw-Hill, 1961.
  20. ^ . Browne Popular Culture Library News. Bowling Green State University. May 31, 1994. Archived from the original on October 6, 2011. Retrieved October 22, 2009.
  21. ^ "About "The Pulpster"". The Pulpster. March 5, 2021.
  22. ^ Stephensen-Payne, Phil (2018). "Pulp Adventures". Magazine Data File.
  23. ^ "Pulp Fiction (1994) – Release Info" – via IMDb.
  24. ^ . Dcthomson.co.uk. Archived from the original on August 18, 2010. Retrieved December 8, 2010.
  25. ^ "Ten Years in the Shadow's Sanctum — Anthony Tollin's Sanctum Books – PulpFest".

Sources

  • Chambliss, Julian and William Svitavsky, "From Pulp Hero to Superhero: Culture, Race, and Identity in AmericanPopular Culture, 1900–1940," Studies in American Culture 30 (1) (October 2008)
  • Ellis, Doug. Uncovered: The Hidden Art of the Girlie Pulps – Gold Medal Winner for Best Popular Culture Book BEA 2004 (Adventure House, −2003) ISBN 1-886937-74-5
  • Gunnison, Locke and Ellis. Adventure House Guide to the Pulps (Adventure House, 2000) ISBN 1-886937-45-1
  • Hersey, Harold. The New Pulpwood Editor (Adventure House, 2003) ISBN 1-886937-68-0
  • Lesser, Robert. Pulp Art: Original Cover Paintings for the Great American Pulp Magazines (Book Sales, 2003) ISBN 0-7858-1707-7
  • Locke, John-editor. Pulp Fictioneers – Adventures in the Storytelling Business (Adventure House, 2004) ISBN 1-886937-83-4
  • Locke, John-editor. Pulpwood Days – Vol. 1 Editors You Want To Know (Off-Trail Publications, 2007) ISBN 0-9786836-2-5
  • Parfrey, Adam, et al. It's a Man's World: Men's Adventure Magazines, the Postwar Pulps (Feral House, 2003) ISBN 0-922915-81-4
  • Robinson, Frank and Davidson, Lawrence. Pulp Culture (Collector's Press, 2007) ISBN 978-1-933112-30-5

Further reading

  • Dinan, John A. (1983) The Pulp Western : A Popular History of the Western Fiction Magazine in America. Borgo Press, ISBN 0-89370-161-0.
  • Goodstone, Tony (1970) The Pulps: 50 Years of American Pop Culture, Bonanza Books (Crown Publishers, Inc.), ISBN 978-0-394-44186-3.
  • Goulart, Ron (1972) Cheap Thrills: An Informal History of the Pulp Magazine, Arlington House, ISBN 978-0-87000-172-7.
  • Goulart, Ron (1988) The Dime Detectives. Mysterious Press, 1988. ISBN 0-89296-191-0.
  • Hamilton, Frank and Hullar, Link (1988), Amazing Pulp Heroes, Gryphon Books, ISBN 0-936071-09-5.
  • Robbins, Leonard A. (1988). The Pulp Magazine Index. (Six Volumes). Starmont House. ISBN 1-55742-111-0.
  • Sampson, Robert (1983) Yesterday's Faces: A Study of Series Characters in the Early Pulp Magazines . Volume 1. Glory figures, Vol. 2. Strange days, Vol. 3. From the Dark Side, Vol. 4. The Solvers, Vol 5. Dangerous Horizons, Vol. 6. Violent lives. Bowling Green University Popular Press, ISBN 0-87972-217-7.

External links

 
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Pulp magazines.
  • The Pulp Magazines Project
  • ThePulp.Net
  • PEAPS – Pulp Era Amateur Press Society
  • Pulp Illustration Art
  • Pulp International
  • CNN: "Girls, Guns and Money," November 2005
  • Mt. St. Vincent University Lesbian Pulp Fiction Collection
  • , slideshow by Life
  • Pulp Fiction Collection at the Library of Congress
  • Clark Pulp Fiction Collection at Cleveland Public Library

January 26, 2023
pulp, magazine, also, referred, pulps, were, inexpensive, fiction, magazines, that, were, published, from, 1896, late, 1950s, term, pulp, derives, from, cheap, wood, pulp, paper, which, magazines, were, printed, contrast, magazines, printed, higher, quality, p. Pulp magazines also referred to as the pulps were inexpensive fiction magazines that were published from 1896 to the late 1950s The term pulp derives from the cheap wood pulp paper on which the magazines were printed In contrast magazines printed on higher quality paper were called glossies or slicks The typical pulp magazine had 128 pages it was 7 inches 18 cm wide by 10 inches 25 cm high and 0 5 inches 1 3 cm thick with ragged untrimmed edges The pulps gave rise to the term pulp fiction in reference to run of the mill low quality literature Pulps were the successors to the penny dreadfuls dime novels and short fiction magazines of the 19th century Although many respected writers wrote for pulps the magazines were best known for their lurid exploitative and sensational subject matter even though this was but a small part of what existed in the pulps Successors of pulps include paperback books digest magazines and men s adventure magazines Modern superhero comic books are sometimes considered descendants of hero pulps pulp magazines often featured illustrated novel length stories of heroic characters such as Flash Gordon The Shadow Doc Savage and The Phantom Detective Contents 1 History 1 1 Origins 1 2 Peak of popularity 1 3 World War II and market decline 2 Genres 3 Notable original characters 4 Illustrators 5 Authors and editors 6 Authors featured 7 Publishers 8 Legacy 9 See also 10 References 11 Sources 12 Further reading 13 External linksHistory EditOrigins Edit The first pulp was Frank Munsey s revamped Argosy magazine of 1896 with about 135 000 words 192 pages per issue on pulp paper with untrimmed edges and no illustrations even on the cover The steam powered printing press had been in widespread use for some time enabling the boom in dime novels prior to Munsey however no one had combined cheap printing cheap paper and cheap authors in a package that provided affordable entertainment to young working class people In six years Argosy went from a few thousand copies per month to over half a million 1 Street amp Smith a dime novel and boys weekly publisher was next on the market Seeing Argosy s success they launched The Popular Magazine in 1903 which they billed as the biggest magazine in the world by virtue of its being two pages the interior sides of the front and back cover longer than Argosy Due to differences in page layout however the magazine had substantially less text than Argosy The Popular Magazine did introduce color covers to pulp publishing and the magazine began to take off when in 1905 the publishers acquired the rights to serialize Ayesha by H Rider Haggard a sequel to his popular novel She Haggard s Lost World genre influenced several key pulp writers including Edgar Rice Burroughs Robert E Howard Talbot Mundy and Abraham Merritt 2 In 1907 the cover price rose to 15 cents and 30 pages were added to each issue along with establishing a stable of authors for each magazine this change proved successful and circulation began to approach that of Argosy Street and Smith s next innovation was the introduction of specialized genre pulps with each magazine focusing on a particular genre such as detective stories romance etc 3 Cover of the pulp magazine Spicy Detective Stories vol 2 6 April 1935 featuring Bullet from Nowhere by Robert Leslie Bellem Peak of popularity Edit At their peak of popularity in the 1920s 1940s 4 the most successful pulps sold up to one million copies per issue In 1934 Frank Gruber said there were some 150 pulp titles The most successful pulp magazines were Argosy Adventure Blue Book and Short Stories collectively described by some pulp historians as The Big Four 5 Among the best known other titles of this period were Amazing Stories Black Mask Dime Detective Flying Aces Horror Stories Love Story Magazine Marvel Tales 6 Oriental Stories Planet Stories Spicy Detective Startling Stories Thrilling Wonder Stories Unknown Weird Tales and Western Story Magazine 6 During the economic hardships of the Great Depression pulps provided affordable content to the masses and were one of the primary forms of entertainment along with film and radio 4 Although pulp magazines were primarily an American phenomenon there were also a number of British pulp magazines published between the Edwardian era and World War II Notable UK pulps included Pall Mall Magazine The Novel Magazine Cassell s Magazine The Story Teller The Sovereign Magazine Hutchinson s Adventure Story and Hutchinson s Mystery Story 7 The German fantasy magazine Der Orchideengarten had a similar format to American pulp magazines in that it was printed on rough pulp paper and heavily illustrated 8 World War II and market decline Edit Pulp magazines began to decline during the 1940s giving way to paperbacks comics and digest sized novels During the Second World War paper shortages had a serious impact on pulp production starting a steady rise in costs and the decline of the pulps Beginning with Ellery Queen s Mystery Magazine in 1941 pulp magazines began to switch to digest size smaller thicker magazines In 1949 Street amp Smith closed most of their pulp magazines in order to move upmarket and produce slicks 9 Competition from comic books and paperback novels further eroded the pulps marketshare but it was the widespread expansion of television that sounded the death knell of the pulps 4 In a more affluent post war America the price gap compared to slick magazines was far less significant In the 1950s men s adventure magazines began to replace the pulp The 1957 liquidation of the American News Company then the primary distributor of pulp magazines has sometimes been taken as marking the end of the pulp era by that date many of the famous pulps of the previous generation including Black Mask The Shadow Doc Savage and Weird Tales were defunct 1 Almost all of the few remaining pulp magazines are science fiction or mystery magazines now in formats similar to digest size such as Analog Science Fiction and Fact and Ellery Queen s Mystery Magazine The format is still in use for some lengthy serials like the German science fiction weekly Perry Rhodan over 3 000 issues as of 2019 Over the course of their evolution there were a huge number of pulp magazine titles Harry Steeger of Popular Publications claimed that his company alone had published over 300 and at their peak they were publishing 42 titles per month 10 Many titles of course survived only briefly While the most popular titles were monthly many were bimonthly and some were quarterly The collapse of the pulp industry changed the landscape of publishing because pulps were the single largest sales outlet for short stories Combined with the decrease in slick magazine fiction markets writers attempting to support themselves by creating fiction switched to novels and book length anthologies of shorter pieces Some ex pulp writers like Hugh B Cave and Robert Leslie Bellem moved on to writing for television by the 1950s Genres EditPulp magazines often contained a wide variety of genre fiction including but not limited to adventure aviation detective mystery espionage fantasy gangster horror occult including weird menace humor railroad romance science fiction Serie Noire French crime mystery spicy saucy soft porn sports war Westerns also see dime Western the Colorado artist Arthur Roy Mitchell is particularly known for his sketches of the covers of such western magazines The American Old West was a mainstay genre of early turn of the 20th century novels as well as later pulp magazines and lasted longest of all the traditional pulps In many ways the later men s adventure the sweats was the replacement of pulps Many classic science fiction and crime novels were originally serialized in pulp magazines such as Weird Tales Amazing Stories and Black Mask Notable original characters EditWhile the majority of pulp magazines were anthology titles featuring many different authors characters and settings some of the most enduring magazines were those that featured a single recurring character These were often referred to as hero pulps because the recurring character was almost always a larger than life hero in the mold of Doc Savage or The Shadow 11 Popular pulp characters that headlined in their own magazines The Avenger The Black Bat Captain Future El Coyote Dan Turner Hollywood Detective Doc Savage Doctor Death Dr Yen Sin G 8 Hopalong Cassidy Ka Zar Lord Lister aka Raffles Nick Carter Operator No 5 The Phantom Detective Secret Agent X The Shadow The Spider Popular pulp characters who appeared in anthology titles such as All Story or Weird Tales Biggles Bran Mak Morn Buck Rogers Conan the Barbarian The Continental Op Domino Lady The Eel Green Lama Jim Anthony John Carter of Mars Jules de Grandin Khlit the Cossack Kull Moon Man Sexton Blake Solomon Kane Tarzan ZorroIllustrators EditPulp covers were printed in color on higher quality slick paper They were famous for their half dressed damsels in distress usually awaiting a rescuing hero Cover art played a major part in the marketing of pulp magazines The early pulp magazines could boast covers by some distinguished American artists The Popular Magazine had covers by N C Wyeth and Edgar Franklin Wittmack contributed cover art to Argosy 12 and Short Stories 13 Later many artists specialized in creating covers mainly for the pulps a number of the most successful cover artists became as popular as the authors featured on the interior pages Among the most famous pulp artists were Walter Baumhofer Earle K Bergey Margaret Brundage Edd Cartier Virgil Finlay Frank R Paul Norman Saunders Emmett Watson Nick Eggenhofer who specialized in Western illustrations Hugh J Ward George Rozen and Rudolph Belarski 14 Covers were important enough to sales that sometimes they would be designed first authors would then be shown the cover art and asked to write a story to match Later pulps began to feature interior illustrations depicting elements of the stories The drawings were printed in black ink on the same cream colored paper used for the text and had to use specific techniques to avoid blotting on the coarse texture of the cheap pulp Thus fine lines and heavy detail were usually not an option Shading was by crosshatching or pointillism and even that had to be limited and coarse Usually the art was black lines on the paper s background but Finlay and a few others did some work that was primarily white lines against large dark areas Authors and editors EditAnother way pulps kept costs down was by paying authors less than other markets thus many eminent authors started out in the pulps before they were successful enough to sell to better paying markets and similarly well known authors whose careers were slumping or who wanted a few quick dollars could bolster their income with sales to pulps Additionally some of the earlier pulps solicited stories from amateurs who were quite happy to see their words in print and could thus be paid token amounts 15 There were also career pulp writers capable of turning out huge amounts of prose on a steady basis often with the aid of dictation to stenographers machines or typists Before he became a novelist Upton Sinclair was turning out at least 8 000 words per day seven days a week for the pulps keeping two stenographers fully employed Pulps would often have their authors use multiple pen names so that they could use multiple stories by the same person in one issue or use a given author s stories in three or more successive issues while still appearing to have varied content One advantage pulps provided to authors was that they paid upon acceptance for material instead of on publication since a story might be accepted months or even years before publication to a working writer this was a crucial difference in cash flow Some pulp editors became known for cultivating good fiction and interesting features in their magazines Preeminent pulp magazine editors included Arthur Sullivant Hoffman Adventure 16 Robert H Davis All Story Weekly Harry E Maule Short Stories 17 Donald Kennicott Blue Book Joseph T Shaw Black Mask Farnsworth Wright Weird Tales Oriental Stories John W Campbell Astounding Science Fiction Unknown and Daisy Bacon Love Story Magazine Detective Story Magazine 18 Authors featured EditWell known authors who wrote for pulps include Poul Anderson Isaac Asimov Charles Beadle H Bedford Jones Robert Leslie Bellem E F Benson Alfred Bester Robert Bloch B M Bower Leigh Brackett Ray Bradbury Max Brand William Brandon Fredric Brown John Buchan F R Buckley Edgar Rice Burroughs William S Burroughs Ellis Parker Butler Hugh B Cave Paul Chadwick Raymond Chandler Agatha Christie Arthur C Clarke Joseph Conrad Stephen Crane Ray Cummings Tom Curry Lester Dent August Derleth Philip K Dick J Allan Dunn Lord Dunsany C M Eddy Jr Arthur Guy Empey George Allan England Philip Jose Farmer C S Forester F Scott Fitzgerald Arthur O Friel Erle Stanley Gardner Walter B Gibson David Goodis L Patrick Greene Zane Grey Frank Gruber H Rider Haggard Edmond Hamilton Dashiell Hammett Margie Harris Victor Headley Robert A Heinlein O Henry Frank Herbert Robert E Howard L Ron Hubbard Carl Jacobi John Jakes Ardyth Kennelly Donald Keyhoe Rudyard Kipling Henry Kuttner Harold Lamb Louis L Amour Margery Lawrence Fritz Leiber Murray Leinster Elmore John Leonard Jack London H P Lovecraft Giles A Lutz John D MacDonald William Colt MacDonald Elmer Brown Mason F Van Wyck Mason Horace McCoy Johnston McCulley Eldred Kurtz Means Merriam Modell C L Moore Frederick Ferdinand Moore Walt Morey Talbot Mundy Philip Francis Nowlan Fulton Oursler Hugh Pendexter Emil Petaja E Hoffmann Price Ellery Queen Seabury Quinn John H Reese Arthur B Reeve Tod Robbins Sax Rohmer Theodore Roscoe Rafael Sabatini Charles Alden Seltzer Stephen Shadegg Richard S Shaver Robert Silverberg Bertrand William Sinclair Upton Sinclair Arthur D Howden Smith Clark Ashton Smith E E Smith Mickey Spillane T S Stribling Jim Thompson Thomas Thursday W C Tuttle Mark Twain Jack Vance E C Vivian Edgar Wallace H G Wells Henry S Whitehead Raoul Whitfield Tennessee Williams P G Wodehouse Cornell Woolrich Gordon Young Sinclair Lewis first American winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature worked as an editor for Adventure writing filler paragraphs brief facts or amusing anecdotes designed to fill small gaps in page layout advertising copy and a few stories 19 Publishers Edit Cover of the pulp magazine Dime Mystery Book Magazine January 1933 A A Wyn s Magazine Publishers Better Standard Thrilling The Thrilling Group published Captain Future and Startling Stories William Clayton published Ginger Stories Pep Stories and Snappy Stories Columbia Publications published Future Science Fiction Science Fiction and Science Fiction Quarterly Dell Publishing published I Confess Harry Donenfeld published Hot Stories Joy Stories Juicy Tales and Spicy Stories Doubleday Page and Company published Short Stories West and The Frontier Fiction House published Planet Stories Frank A Munsey Co published Argosy Harold Hersey Harry Donenfeld s Culture Publications published Spicy Detective Spicy Mystery and Spicy Adventure Hugo Gernsback published Amazing Stories and Wonder Stories J C Henneberger s Rural Publications published Weird Tales and Oriental Tales Martin Goodman published Ka Zar Marvel Tales and Marvel Science Stories Hutchinson main publisher of UK pulps 7 Popular Publications published Horror Stories Black Mask True Love and later Argosy The Ridgway Company published Adventure Everybody s Magazine and Romance Street amp Smith published Astounding Unknown Doc Savage and The Shadow Courtland Young s C H Young Publishing published Breezy StoriesLegacy EditThe term pulp fiction is often incorrectly used for massmarket paperbacks since the 1950s The Browne Popular Culture Library News noted Many of the paperback houses that contributed to the decline of the genre Ace Dell Avon among others were actually started by pulp magazine publishers They had the presses the expertise and the newsstand distribution networks which made the success of the mass market paperback possible These pulp oriented paperback houses mined the old magazines for reprints This kept pulp literature if not pulp magazines alive The Return of the Continental Op reprints material first published in Black Mask Five Sinister Characters contains stories first published in Dime Detective and The Pocket Book of Science Fiction collects material from Thrilling Wonder Stories Astounding Science Fiction and Amazing Stories 20 But note that mass market paperbacks are not pulps In 1991 The Pulpster debuted at that year s Pulpcon the annual pulp magazine convention that had begun in 1972 The magazine devoted to the history and legacy of the pulp magazines has published each year since It now appears in connection with PulpFest the summer pulp convention that grew out of and replaced Pulpcon The Pulpster was originally edited by Tony Davis and is currently edited by William Lampkin who also runs the website ThePulp Net Contributors have included Don Hutchison Robert Sampson Will Murray Al Tonik Nick Carr Mike Resnick Hugh B Cave Joseph Wrzos Jessica Amanda Salmonson Chet Williamson and many others 21 In 1992 Rich W Harvey came out with a magazine called Pulp Adventures reprinting old classics It came out regularly until 2001 and then started up again in 2014 22 In 1994 Quentin Tarantino directed the film Pulp Fiction The working title of the film was Black Mask 23 in homage to the pulp magazine of that name and it embodied the seedy violent often crime related spirit found in pulp magazines In 1997 C Cazadessus Jr launched Pulpdom a continuation of his Hugo Award winning ERB dom which began in 1960 It ran for 75 issues and featured articles about the content and selected fiction from the pulps It became Pulpdom Online in 2013 and continues quarterly publication After the year 2000 several small independent publishers released magazines which published short fiction either short stories or novel length presentations in the tradition of the pulp magazines of the early 20th century These included Blood N Thunder High Adventure and a short lived magazine which revived the title Argosy These specialist publications printed in limited press runs were pointedly not printed on the brittle high acid wood pulp paper of the old publications and were not mass market publications targeted at a wide audience In 2004 Lost Continent Library published Secret of the Amazon Queen by E A Guest their first contribution to a New Pulp Era featuring the hallmarks of pulp fiction for contemporary mature readers violence horror and sex E A Guest was likened to a blend of pulp era icon Talbot Mundy and Stephen King by real life explorer David Hatcher Childress In 2002 the tenth issue of McSweeney s Quarterly was guest edited by Michael Chabon Published as McSweeney s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales it is a collection of pulp fiction stories written by such current well known authors as Stephen King Nick Hornby Aimee Bender and Dave Eggers Explaining his vision for the project Chabon wrote in the introduction I think that we have forgotten how much fun reading a short story can be and I hope that if nothing else this treasury goes some small distance toward reminding us of that lost but fundamental truth The Scottish publisher DC Thomson publishes My Weekly Compact Novel every week 24 It is literally a pulp novel though it does not fall into the hard edged genre most associated with pulp fiction citation needed From 2006 through 2019 Anthony Tollin s imprint Sanctum Books has reprinted all 182 DOC SAVAGE pulp novels all 24 of Paul Ernst s AVENGER novels the 14 WHISPERER novels from the original pulp series and all but three novels of the entire run of THE SHADOW most of his publications featuring two novels in one book 25 In 2021 Dave Martel started to release issues of Bizarchives which is a publication of modern day pulp fiction and weird tales See also Edit Novels portalB movie Crimefighters Dime novel George Kelley Paperback and Pulp Fiction Collection Hard Case Crime Il Giallo Mondadori Science fiction magazineReferences Edit a b A Two Minute History of the Pulps in The Adventure House Guide to the Pulps edited by Doug Ellis John Locke and John Gunnison Silver Spring MD Adventure House 2000 p ii iv See Lee Server Encyclopedia of Pulp Fiction Writers 2002 pg 131 Reynolds Quentin The Fiction Factory Or From Pulp Row to Quality Street The Story of 100 Years of Publishing at Street amp Smith Random House 1955 Covers Street amp Smith Nick Carter Max Brand Buffalo Bill Frank Merriwell Gerald Smith Richard Duffy Frederick Faust dime novel Horatio Alger Henry Ralston Ned Buntline Ormond Smith Beadle s Edward Stratemeyer detective fiction Laura Jean Libbey Astounding Science Fiction Edith Evans a b c Pulp Illustration Pulp Magazines Illustration History www illustrationhistory org Retrieved January 22 2020 Hulse Ed 2009 The Big Four Plus One in The Blood n Thunder Guide to Collecting Pulps Murania Press ISBN 0 9795955 0 9 pp 19 47 a b Server Lee 1993 Danger Is My Business an illustrated history of the Fabulous Pulp Magazines San Francisco Chronicle Books pp 62 65 ISBN 978 0 8118 0112 6 a b Ashley Michael 2006 The Age of the Storytellers British Popular Fiction Magazines 1880 1950 British Library ISBN 1 58456 170 X Orchideengarten Der in M B Tymn and Mike Ashley Science Fiction Fantasy and Weird Fiction Magazines Westport Greenwood 1985 pp 866 ISBN 0 313 21221 X Ashley Michael The history of the science fiction magazine the story of the science fiction magazines from 1950 to 1970 Transformations Volume 2 2005 pg 3 ISBN 978 0 85323 779 2 Haining Peter 1975 The Fantastic Pulps Vintage Books a division of Random House ISBN 0 394 72109 8 Hutchison Don 1995 The Great Pulp Heroes Mosaic Press ISBN 0 88962 585 9 Hulse Ed 2009 The Blood n Thunder Guide to Collecting Pulps Muriana Press pp 26 163 ISBN 978 0979595509 Robinson Frank M and Davidson Lawrence Pulp Culture The Art of Fiction Magazines Collectors Press 2007 ISBN 1 933112 30 1 p 42 The Adventure House Guide to the Pulps edited by Doug Ellis John Locke and John Gunnison Silver Spring MD Adventure House 2000 p xi xii John A Dinan Sports in the Pulp Magazines McFarland 1998 ISB0786404817 pp 130 32 Bleiler Richard Forgotten Giant Hoffman s Adventure Purple Prose Magazine November 1998 p 3 12 Sampson Robert 1991 Yesterday s Faces Dangerous Horizons Popular Press 1991 p 87 Locke John ed Editors You Want to Know Daisy Bacon by Joa Humphrey in Pulpwood Days Editors You Want to Know Off Trail 2007 ISBN 0 9786836 2 5 p 77 Daisy Bacon 1899 1986 was nicknamed Queen of the Woodpulps Schorer M Sinclair Lewis An American Life pp 3 22 McGraw Hill 1961 They Came from the Newsstand Pulp Magazines from the Browne Library Browne Popular Culture Library News Bowling Green State University May 31 1994 Archived from the original on October 6 2011 Retrieved October 22 2009 About The Pulpster The Pulpster March 5 2021 Stephensen Payne Phil 2018 Pulp Adventures Magazine Data File Pulp Fiction 1994 Release Info via IMDb DC Thomson Shop Home Page Dcthomson co uk Archived from the original on August 18 2010 Retrieved December 8 2010 Ten Years in the Shadow s Sanctum Anthony Tollin s Sanctum Books PulpFest Sources EditChambliss Julian and William Svitavsky From Pulp Hero to Superhero Culture Race and Identity in AmericanPopular Culture 1900 1940 Studies in American Culture 30 1 October 2008 Ellis Doug Uncovered The Hidden Art of the Girlie Pulps Gold Medal Winner for Best Popular Culture Book BEA 2004 Adventure House 2003 ISBN 1 886937 74 5 Gunnison Locke and Ellis Adventure House Guide to the Pulps Adventure House 2000 ISBN 1 886937 45 1 Hersey Harold The New Pulpwood Editor Adventure House 2003 ISBN 1 886937 68 0 Lesser Robert Pulp Art Original Cover Paintings for the Great American Pulp Magazines Book Sales 2003 ISBN 0 7858 1707 7 Locke John editor Pulp Fictioneers Adventures in the Storytelling Business Adventure House 2004 ISBN 1 886937 83 4 Locke John editor Pulpwood Days Vol 1 Editors You Want To Know Off Trail Publications 2007 ISBN 0 9786836 2 5 Parfrey Adam et al It s a Man s World Men s Adventure Magazines the Postwar Pulps Feral House 2003 ISBN 0 922915 81 4 Robinson Frank and Davidson Lawrence Pulp Culture Collector s Press 2007 ISBN 978 1 933112 30 5Further reading EditDinan John A 1983 The Pulp Western A Popular History of the Western Fiction Magazine in America Borgo Press ISBN 0 89370 161 0 Goodstone Tony 1970 The Pulps 50 Years of American Pop Culture Bonanza Books Crown Publishers Inc ISBN 978 0 394 44186 3 Goulart Ron 1972 Cheap Thrills An Informal History of the Pulp Magazine Arlington House ISBN 978 0 87000 172 7 Goulart Ron 1988 The Dime Detectives Mysterious Press 1988 ISBN 0 89296 191 0 Hamilton Frank and Hullar Link 1988 Amazing Pulp Heroes Gryphon Books ISBN 0 936071 09 5 Robbins Leonard A 1988 The Pulp Magazine Index Six Volumes Starmont House ISBN 1 55742 111 0 Sampson Robert 1983 Yesterday s Faces A Study of Series Characters in the Early Pulp Magazines Volume 1 Glory figures Vol 2 Strange days Vol 3 From the Dark Side Vol 4 The Solvers Vol 5 Dangerous Horizons Vol 6 Violent lives Bowling Green University Popular Press ISBN 0 87972 217 7 External links Edit Wikimedia Commons has media related to Pulp magazines The Pulp Magazines Project ThePulp Net PEAPS Pulp Era Amateur Press Society Pulp Illustration Art Pulp International CNN Girls Guns and Money November 2005 Mt St Vincent University Lesbian Pulp Fiction Collection Pulp Winds December 2009 In Praise of Pulp Fiction slideshow by Life Pulp Fiction Collection at the Library of Congress Clark Pulp Fiction Collection at Cleveland Public Library Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Pulp magazine amp oldid 1130334911, wikipedia, 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