Pulp magazine

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 wide by high, and 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."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).

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 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.

Peak of popularity

At their peak of popularity in the 1920s–1940s, 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". 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'', ''Oriental Stories'', '' Planet Stories'', ''Spicy Detective'', '' Startling Stories'', '' Thrilling Wonder Stories'', '' Unknown'', ''Weird Tales'' and '' Western Story Magazine''.

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.

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''.Ashley, Michael (2006). ''The Age of the Storytellers: British Popular Fiction Magazines, 1880–1950''. British Library. 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.

World War II and market decline

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.

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. 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 ''