Pulp magazines (also referred to as "the pulps") were inexpensive fictionmagazines that were published from 1896 until around 1955. The term "pulp" derives from thewood pulp paper on which the magazines were printed, due to their cheap nature. In contrast, magazines printed on higher-quality paper were called "glossies" or "slicks". The typical pulp magazine was 128 pages,[1] 7 inches (18 cm) wide by 10 inches (25 cm) high, and 0.5 inches (1.3 cm) thick, with ragged, untrimmed edges. Pulps were the successors to thepenny 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 andmen's adventure magazines were incorrectly regarded as pulps, though they have different editorial and production standards and are instead replacements. Modernsuperherocomic books are sometimes considered descendants of "hero pulps"; pulp magazines often featured illustrated novel-length stories of heroic characters, such asFlash Gordon,The Shadow,Doc Savage, andThe Phantom Detective.
The pulps gave rise to the termpulp fiction in reference to run-of-the-mill, low-quality literature. Successors of pulps includepaperback books, such ashardboiled detective stories anderotic fiction.[2][3][4]
Before pulp magazines,Newgate novels (1840s-1860s) fictionalized the exploits of real-life criminals. Later, Britishsensation novels gained peak popularity in the 1860s-1870s. Sensation novels focused on shocking stories that reflected modern-day anxieties, and were the direct precursors of pulp fiction.[5][6]
The first "pulp" wasFrank Munsey's revampedArgosy 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.[7]
Street & Smith, adime novel and boys' weekly publisher, was next on the market. SeeingArgosy's success, they launchedThe 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 thanArgosy. Due to differences inpage layout however, the magazine had substantially less text thanArgosy.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 serializeAyesha (1905), byH. Rider Haggard, a sequel to his popular novelShe (1887). Haggard'sLost World genre influenced several key pulp writers, includingEdgar Rice Burroughs,Robert E. Howard,Talbot Mundy andAbraham Merritt.[8] 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 ofArgosy. 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.[9]
At their peak of popularity in the 1920s–1940s,[10] 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 wereArgosy,Adventure,Blue Book andShort Stories, collectively described by some pulp historians as "The Big Four".[11] Among the best-known other titles of this period wereAmazing Stories,Black Mask,Dime Detective,Flying Aces,Horror Stories,Love Story Magazine,Marvel Tales,[12]Oriental Stories,Planet Stories,Spicy Detective,Startling Stories,Thrilling Wonder Stories,Unknown,Weird Tales andWestern Story Magazine.[12]
During the economic hardships of theGreat Depression, pulps provided affordable content to the masses, and were one of the primary forms of entertainment, along withfilm andradio.[10]
Although pulp magazines were primarily an American phenomenon, there were also a number of British pulp magazines published between theEdwardian era andWorld War II. Notable UK pulps includedThe Pall Mall Magazine,The Novel Magazine,Cassell's Magazine,The Story-Teller,The Sovereign Magazine,Hutchinson's Adventure-Story andHutchinson's Mystery-Story.[13] The German fantasy magazineDer Orchideengarten had a similar format to American pulp magazines, in that it was printed on rough pulp paper and heavily illustrated.[14]
During theSecond 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 ofEllery Queen's Mystery Magazine in 1941, some magazines began to switch todigest size: smaller, sometimes thicker magazines. In 1949, Street & Smith closed most of their pulp magazines in order to move upmarket and produceslicks.[15]
Competition fromcomic-books andpaperback novels further eroded the pulps' market share, but it has been suggested the widespread expansion oftelevision also drew away the readership of the pulps.[10] 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 also began to draw some former pulp readers.
The 1957 liquidation of theAmerican 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, includingBlack Mask,The Shadow,Doc Savage, andWeird Tales, were defunct (though some of those titles have been revived in various formats in the decades since).[7] Almost all of the few remaining former pulp magazines are science fiction ormystery magazines, now in formats similar to "digest size", such asAnalog Science Fiction and Fact, though the most durable revival ofWeird 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 weeklyPerry 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 ofPopular Publications claimed that his company alone had published over 300, and at their peak they were publishing 42 titles per month.[16] 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 trying to support themselves by creating fiction switched to novels and book-length anthologies of shorter pieces. Some ex-pulp writers likeHugh B. Cave andRobert Leslie Bellem had moved on to writing for television by the 1950s.
The last pulp to cease publication wasRanch Romances in 1971.[17]
Pulp magazines often contained a wide variety ofgenre fiction, including, but not limited to:
TheAmerican 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 latermen's adventure ("the sweats") was the replacement of pulps.
Many classic science fiction and crime novels were originallyserialized in pulp magazines such asWeird Tales,Amazing Stories, andBlack Mask.
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 ofDoc Savage orThe Shadow.[19]
Popular pulp characters that headlined in their own magazines:
Popular pulp characters who appeared in anthology titles such asAll-Story orWeird Tales:
Pulp covers were printed in color on higher-quality (slick) paper. They were famous for their half-dresseddamsels in distress, usually awaiting a rescuinghero. 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 byN. C. Wyeth, andEdgar Franklin Wittmack contributed cover art toArgosy[20] andShort Stories.[21] 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 wereWalter M. Baumhofer,Earle K. Bergey,Margaret Brundage,Edd Cartier,Virgil Finlay,Frank R. Paul,Norman Saunders,Emmett Watson,Nick Eggenhofer, (who specialized inWestern illustrations),Hugh J. Ward,George Rozen, andRudolph Belarski.[22] 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 bycrosshatching orpointillism, 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.
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.[23]
There were also career pulp writers, capable of turning out huge amounts of prose on a steady basis, often with the aid ofdictation tostenographers, machines ortypists. 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 paidupon 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 incash flow.
Some pulp editors became known for cultivating good fiction and interesting features in their magazines. Preeminent pulp magazine editors includedArthur Sullivant Hoffman (Adventure),[24]Robert H. Davis (All-Story Weekly),Harry E. Maule (Short Stories),[25]Donald Kennicott (Blue Book),Joseph Shaw (Black Mask),Farnsworth Wright (Weird Tales,Oriental Stories),John W. Campbell (Astounding Science Fiction,Unknown) andDaisy Bacon (Love Story Magazine,Detective Story Magazine).[26]
Well-known authors who wrote for pulps include:
Sinclair Lewis, first American winner of theNobel Prize in Literature, worked as an editor forAdventure, writing filler paragraphs (brief facts or amusing anecdotes designed to fill small gaps in page layout), advertising copy and a few stories.[27]
The termpulp fiction is often used for mass market 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 inBlack Mask;Five Sinister Characters contains stories first published inDime Detective; andThe Pocket Book of Science Fiction collects material fromThrilling Wonder Stories,Astounding Science Fiction andAmazing Stories.[28] But note that mass market paperbacks are not pulps.
In 1991,The Pulpster debuted at that year'sPulpcon, the annual pulp magazine convention that had begun in 1972. The magazine, devoted to the history and legacy of the pulp magazines, has been published each year since. It now appears in connection withPulpFest, 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.[29]
In 1992, Rich W. Harvey came out with a magazine calledPulp Adventures reprinting old classics. It came out regularly until 2001, and then started up again in 2014.[30]
In 1994,Quentin Tarantino directed the filmPulp Fiction. Theworking title of the film wasBlack Mask,[31] in homage to thepulp magazine of that name, and it embodied the seedy, violent, often crime-related spirit found in pulp magazines.
In 1997 C. Cazadessus Jr. launchedPulpdom, a continuation of his Hugo Award-winningERB-dom which began in 1960. It ran for 75 issues and featured articles about the content and selected fiction from the pulps. It becamePulpdom 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 includedBlood 'N Thunder,High Adventure and a short-lived magazine which revived the titleArgosy. 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 publishedSecret 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 ofMcSweeney's Quarterly was guest edited byMichael Chabon. Published asMcSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, it is a collection of "pulp fiction" stories written by such current well-known authors asStephen King,Nick Hornby,Aimee Bender, andDave 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."
TheScottish publisherDC Thomson publishes "My Weekly Compact Novel" every week.[32] 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 182Doc Savage pulp novels, all 24 of Paul Ernst'sAvenger novels, the 14Whisperer novels from the original pulp series and all but three novels of the entire run ofThe Shadow (most of his publications featuring two novels in one book).[33]
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