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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Pulp magazines (also referred to as "the pulps") were inexpensive fiction
magazines that were published from 1896 until around 1955. 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
[1]

(25 cm) high, and 0.5 inches (1.3 cm) thick, with ragged, untrimmed edges. 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. Digest magazines and men's adventure
magazines were also regarded as pulps. 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.
The pulps gave rise to the term pulp fiction in reference to run-of-the-mill, low-
quality literature. Successors of pulps include paperback books, such
as hardboiled detective stories and erotic fiction.
[2][3][4]

History[edit]
Origins[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. [5]

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. In 1907, the
[6]

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.
[7]

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, the most successful pulps sold up to
[8]

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". Among the best-known other titles of this period were Amazing Stories, Black
[9]

Mask, Dime Detective, Flying Aces, Horror Stories, Love Story Magazine, Marvel
Tales, Oriental Stories, Planet Stories, Spicy Detective, Startling Stories, Thrilling
[10]

Wonder Stories, Unknown, Weird Tales and Western Story Magazine. [10]
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. [8]

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. The [11]

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. [12]

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. Following the
model of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine in 1941, some magazines began to
switch to digest size: smaller, sometimes thicker magazines. In 1949, Street & Smith
closed most of their pulp magazines in order to move upmarket and produce slicks. [13]

Competition from comic-books and paperback novels further eroded the pulps'
market share, but it has been suggested the widespread expansion of television also
drew away the readership of the pulps. In a more affluent post-war America, the [8]

price gap compared to slick magazines was far less significant. In the 1950s, men's
adventure magazines also began to draw some former pulp readers.
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 (though some of
those titles have been revived in various formats in the decades since). Almost all of
[5]

the few remaining former pulp magazines are science fiction or mystery magazines,
now in formats similar to "digest size", such as Analog Science Fiction and Fact,
though the most durable revival of Weird Tales began in pulp format, though
published on good-quality paper. The old 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.
Many titles of course survived only briefly. While the most popular titles were
[14]

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 trying 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 had moved on to
writing for television by the 1950s.
Genres[edit]
Pulp magazines often contained a wide variety of genre fiction, including, but not
limited to:

 adventure
 aviation
 detective/mystery
 espionage
 fantasy
 gangster
 "girlie pulps", also called "saucy/spicy pulps" or "sex pulps" (soft porn)
[15]

 horror/occult (including "weird menace")

 humor
 railroad
 romance
 science fiction
 série noire (French crime fiction)
 sports
 war
 Westerns (also see dime Westerns); the Colorado artist Arthur Roy Mitchell is
particularly known for his sketches of the covers of such 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[edit]

November 1927 issue of Black Mask, featuring The

Continental Op
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. [16]

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
 Zorro
Illustrators[edit]
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 and Short Stories. Later, many artists specialized in creating covers
[17] [18]

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. Covers were important enough to sales that
[19]

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[edit]
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. [20]

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), Robert H. Davis (All-Story Weekly), Harry E. Maule (Short
[21]

Stories), Donald Kennicott (Blue Book), Joseph T. Shaw (Black Mask), Farnsworth
[22]

Wright (Weird Tales, Oriental Stories), John W. Campbell (Astounding Science

Fiction, Unknown) and Daisy Bacon (Love Story Magazine, Detective Story
Magazine). [23]

Authors featured[edit]
Well-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
 Paul Cain
 Hugh B. Cave
 Paul Chadwick
 Raymond Chandler
 Agatha Christie
 Arthur C. Clarke
 Joseph Conrad
 Stephen Crane
 Ray Cummings
 Tom Curry
 Carroll John Daly
 Lester Dent
 August Derleth
 Philip K. Dick
 J. Allan Dunn
 Lord Dunsany
 C. M. Eddy, Jr.
 Arthur Guy Empey
 George Allan England
 Philip José 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.
[24]

Publishers[edit]

Cover of the pulp magazine Dime Mystery Book Magazine,

January 1933

 A. A. Wyn's Magazine Publishers (Periodical House/Ace Magazines)

published Secret Agent X, Flying Aces and others
 Better/Standard/Thrilling (The Thrilling Group) published Captain Future, Startling
Stories, The Phantom Detective, and The Black Bat.
 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
 Doubleday, Page and Company published Short Stories, West and The Frontier
 Fiction House published Planet Stories
 Frank A. Munsey Co. published Argosy
 Harold Hersey published Gangster Stories
 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 [11]

 Popular Publications published The Spider, G-8, Horror Stories, Black

Mask, True Love and later Argosy
 The Ridgway Company published Adventure, Everybody's
Magazine and Romance
 Street & Smith published Astounding, Unknown, Doc Savage and The Shadow
 Courtland Young's C.H. Young Publishing published Breezy Stories
Legacy[edit]
The term pulp fiction is often 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. But note that
[25]

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 [Link]. 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. [26]

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. [27]

In 1994, Quentin Tarantino directed the film Pulp Fiction. The working title of the film
was Black Mask, in homage to the pulp magazine of that name, and it embodied the
[28]

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 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. It is literally a pulp novel, though it does not fall into the hard-edged genre
[29]

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).
[30]

In 2021 Dave Martel started to release issues of Bizarchives, a publication of

modern-day pulp fiction and weird tales.
See also[edit]

 Novels portal

 B movie
 Crimefighters
 Dime novel
 George Kelley Paperback and Pulp Fiction Collection
 Hard Case Crime
 Il Giallo Mondadori
 Science fiction magazine
References