Pulp magazine

The Phantom Detective (May 1936)

Pulp magazines (often referred to as "the pulps"), also collectively known as pulp fiction, were inexpensive fiction magazines. They were published from 1896 through the 1950s. The typical pulp magazine was seven inches wide by ten inches high, half an inch thick, and 128 pages long. Pulps were printed on cheap paper with ragged, untrimmed edges.

The name pulp comes from the cheap wood pulp paper on which the magazines were printed. Magazines printed on better paper were called "glossies" or "slicks." In their first decades, they were most often priced at ten cents per magazine, while competing slicks were 25 cents apiece. Pulps were the successor to the penny dreadfuls, dime novels, and short fiction magazines of the nineteenth century. Although many respected writers wrote for pulps, the magazines are best remembered for their lurid and exploitative stories and sensational cover art. Modern superhero comic books are sometimes considered descendants of "hero pulps"; pulp magazines often featured illustrated novel-length stories of heroic characters, such as The Shadow, Doc Savage, and The Phantom Detective.

Contents

Illustrators

Pulp covers, printed in color on higher-quality (slick) paper, 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, and 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 Frank R. Paul, Virgil Finlay, Edd Cartier, Margaret Brundage and Norman Saunders. 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.

Origins

The first "pulp" is considered to be Frank Munsey's revamped Argosy Magazine of 1896, about 135,000 words (192 pages) per issue on pulp paper with untrimmed edges and no illustrations, not even on the cover. While the steam-powered printing press had been in widespread use for some time, enabling the boom in dime novels, prior to Munsey, no one had combined cheap printing, cheap paper and cheap authors in a package that provided affordable entertainment to working-class people. In six years Argosy went from a few thousand copies per month to over half a million.

Street & Smith were next on the market. A dime novel and boys' weekly publisher, they saw Argosy's success, and in 1903 launched The Popular Magazine, which was billed as the "biggest magazine in the world" by virtue of being two pages longer than Argosy. It should be noted that due to differences in page layout, the magazine had substantially less text than Argosy. The Popular Magazine introduced the use of color covers to the pulp world. The magazine began to take off when, in 1905, the publishers acquired the rights to serialize a new work, Ayesha, by H. Rider Haggard, a sequel to his very successful novel She. Haggard's Lost World genre influenced a wide number of pulp writers such as Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, Talbot Mundy and Abraham Merritt [1]. In 1907, they raised the cover price to 15 cents and added 30 pages per issue; this, along with a solid stable of authors, proved a successful formula and circulation began to approach that of Argosy. This demonstrated that the market could support multiple competitors. Street and Smith's next key innovation was the introduction of specialized genre pulps, each magazine focusing on one genre such as detective stories, romance, etc.[2]

At their peak of popularity in the 1920s and 1930s, the most successful pulps could sell up to one million copies per issue. Among the best-known titles of this period were Adventure, Amazing Stories, Black Mask, Dime Detective, Flying Aces, Horror Stories, Marvel Tales, Oriental Stories, Planet Stories, Spicy Detective, Startling Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories, Unknown and Weird Tales.[3]

Although pulp magazines were primarily a US phenomenon, there were also a number of British pulp magazines published between the Edwardian era and World War Two. Notable UK pulps included Pall Mall Magazine, The Novel Magazine, Cassell's Magazine, The Sovereign Magazine, Hutchinson's Adventure-Story and Hutchinson's Mystery-Story. [4]

WWII

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[5].

The pulp format declined from rising expenses, but even more due to the heavy competition from comic books, television, and the paperback novel. 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. 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 2450 issues as of 2009).

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.[6] 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.

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 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

The Spider July 1939
The Shadow January 15, 1933

While the majority of pulp magazines were anthology titles featuring many different authors, characters and settings, some of the most enduringly popular 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.[7]

Popular pulp characters included:

Kilgore Trout, the perennial character in the work of Kurt Vonnegut, is a fictional pulp fiction writer.

Authors

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.

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.

Authors featured

Well-known authors who wrote for pulps include:

  • John D. McDonald
  • Merriam Modell
  • C.L. Moore
  • Walt Morey
  • Talbot Mundy
  • Philip Francis Nowlan
  • Fulton Oursler
  • Emil Petaja
  • E. Hoffmann Price
  • Seabury Quinn
  • John H. Reese
  • Sax Rohmer
  • Rafael Sabatini
  • Richard S. Shaver
  • Robert Silverberg
  • Upton Sinclair
  • Clark Ashton Smith
  • E. E. Smith
  • Guy N. Smith
  • Jim Thompson
  • Thomas Thursday
  • Mark Twain
  • Jack Vance
  • E. C. Vivian
  • H. G. Wells
  • Tennessee Williams
  • Cornell Woolrich

Sinclair Lewis, first American winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, worked as an editor for Adventure (magazine), writing filler paragraphs (brief facts or amusing anecdotes designed to fill small gaps in page layout), advertising copy and a few stories.[8]

Publishers

Operator 5. April 1934

Legacy

The term pulp fiction can also refer to mass market paperbacks since the 1950s. The Brown 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.[9]

In 1994, Quentin Tarantino directed a critically-acclaimed film titled Pulp Fiction. The working title of the film was Black Mask,[10] in homage to the pulp magazine of that name, and it embodied the seedy, violent, often crime-related spirit found in pulp magazines.

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. Another recent incarnation of "classic"-style pulp fiction, verse, and illustration, along the lines of the works which used to grace the page of the original Weird Tales, Fantastic, and Argosy, is the new collection [11]"Pulp Winds", by Wm. Michael Mott, published in December 2009 by TGS Publishing.

Moonstone Books, a comic book and prose anthology publisher, began publishing original pulp tales featuring characters such as The Phantom, Zorro, The Spider, The Avenger, Domino Lady and more in 2001.

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.[12] It is literally a pulp novel, though it does not fall into the hard-edged genre most associated with pulp fiction.

In 2005, a large collection of over 400 pulp magazines were discovered on an Arkansas farm. Stored in four large plastic containers, the collection included an almost conplete run of Argosy from 1939 through the mid-1940s and several Black Book Detective. Mike and Carole Curtis of Greenbrier, Arkansas bought the collection (now known as the Great Arkansas Pulp Find) and have been selling magazines at conventions and through the internet. Included are many tales by ERB and Johnston McCulley, as well as Lester Dent. Most of the pulps are tight with both covers, although some are coverless.

Wildside Press began a Pulp Classics line featuring stories from such notable authors as E. Hoffmann Price, J. Allan Dunn and H. Bedford-Jones. In keepsake editions, they also publish such pulp authors as Robert Wallace. The publisher brought back Weird Tales, Strange Tales and Adventure Tales as magazines. Sherlock Holmes, who made his debut in the British mystery pulp Strand Magazine, now has his own publication, Sherlock Homes Mystery Magazine (Wildside Press).[13]

See also

Flynn's Detective Fiction (1941)

References

  1. ↑ See Lee Server, Encyclopedia of Pulp Fiction Writers (2002), pg.131.
  2. ↑ 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)
  3. ↑ Haining, Peter (2000). The Classic Era of American Pulp Magazines. Prion Books. ISBN 1-85375-388-2. 
  4. ↑ Ashley, Michael (2006). The Age of the Storytellers: British Popular Fiction Magazines, 1880-1950. British Library. ISBN 158456170X
  5. ↑ 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 9780853237792
  6. ↑ Haining, Peter (1975). The Fantastic Pulps. Vintage Books, a division of Random House. ISBN 0-394-72109-8. 
  7. ↑ Hutchison, Don (1995). The Great Pulp Heroes. Mosaic Press. ISBN 0-88962-585-9. 
  8. ↑ Schorer, M. Sinclair Lewis: An American Life, pp. 3-22. McGraw-Hill, 1961.
  9. ↑ "They Came from the Newsstand"
  10. ↑ Pulp Fiction at the Internet Movie Database
  11. ↑ http://hiddenmysteries.com/xcart/product.php?productid=19722&cat=458&page=1
  12. ↑ http://www.dcthomson.co.uk/subscriptions/default.asp?pageName=productDetails&productID=15
  13. ↑ Wildside Press

Further reading

Sources

  • Lesser, Robert. Pulp Art: Original Cover Paintings for the Great American Pulp Magazines (Book Sales, 2003) ISBN 0-7858-1707-7
  • 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
  • Gunnison, Locke and Ellis. Adventure House Guide to the Pulps (Adventure House, 2000) ISBN 1-886937-45-1
  • 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
  • Locke, John-editor. Pulp Fictioneers - Adventures in the Storytelling Business (Adventure House, 2004) ISBN 1-886937-83-4
  • Hersey, Harold. The New Pulpwood Editor (Adventure House, 2003) ISBN 1-886937-68-0
  • Locke, John-editor. Pulpwood Days - Vol. 1 Editors You Want To Know (Off-Trail Publications, 2007) ISBN 0-9786836-2-5
  • Robinson, Frank and Davidson, Lawrence. Pulp Culture (Collector's Press, 2007) ISBN 978-1933112305

External links