PULP MAGAZINES

   In discussions of popular literature, as in this volume, the term "pulp" is used metaphorically as often as specifically, and when used specifically it has both a narrow and a wide sense.1. "Pulp" is used in this encyclopedia as an indication of format, in contrast to BEDSHEET and DIGEST. The pulp magazine normally measured 10in x 7in (about 25cm x18cm); where the word "pulp" is used with no other indication of size, it can be assumed that the magazine in question was of approximately these dimensions.2. More broadly, "pulp" is used to designate the type of magazine whose format is as above. There was more to a pulp magazine than its size. Pulp magazines, as their name suggests, were printed on cheap paper manufactured from chemically treated wood pulp, a process invented in the early 1880s. The paper is coarse, absorbent and acid, with a distinctive sharp smell much loved by magazine collectors. Pulp paper ages badly, largely because of its acid content, yellowing and becoming brittle. Because of the thickness of the paper, pulp magazines tended to be quite bulky, often 1/2in (1.25cm) thick or more. They generally had ragged, untrimmed edges, and later in their history had notoriously garish, brightly coloured covers, many of the coal-tar dyes used to make cover inks being of the most lurid hues.It is usually accepted that Frank A. MUNSEY invented the pulp-magazine formula when in 1896 he changed thecontents of The ARGOSY to contain nothing but fiction; previously the most popular periodicals had published a mixture of fiction, factual articles, poetry, etc. Sf was already popular in magazine format before the advent of the pulps - for example, in The STRAND MAGAZINE , The IDLER and MCCLURE'S MAGAZINE. However, these three and the many like them were aimedat a wealthier, more middle-class and possibly more literate audience than that which the pulps were invented to exploit: they were family magazines, with a more demure format and usually printed on coated, slick paper, which in the USA led to their being dubbed the "slicks" to distinguish them from their humbler brethren, the pulps. It is sometimes stated that the slicks were more expensive than the pulps, but this was not necessarily so.The popular slicks and the pulps were both part of a magazine-publishing revolution beginning in the 1880s, in which mass-distribution techniques and greatly increased advertising allowed the dropping of prices. Most magazines before the 1880s had had a small circulation and been relatively expensive, aimed at a narrow, upper-middle-class, literate group. But now, in the UK and USA, literacy was becoming nearly universal, population was increasing at an amazing rate (doubling in 30 years in the USA), modern technology was on the whole leading to more leisure, and there was as yet no cinema to offer opposition in the telling of stories. As a consequence, magazine circulations became massive towards the end of the century, over half a million in the most successful cases.The slicks and, a little later, the pulps rode the crest of this wave, with the pulps cornering the all-fiction-magazine market. Other periodical formats - some of which had a longer history (BOYS' PAPERS; DIME-NOVEL SF) included the popular weekly tabloid, such as PEARSON'S WEEKLY.The general-fiction pulp magazine began to give way to specialized genre pulps after the founding in 1915 of Detective Story Monthly. (Frank Munsey had been a pioneer here, too, withRailroad Man's Magazine (1906) and Ocean (1907).) Western Story followed in 1919, Love Stories in 1921 and WEIRD TALES in 1923. It is surprising that sf did not get its own pulp until AMAZING STORIES in 1926, for the SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE had been a staple of the general-fiction pulps, alongwith LOST-WORLD stories and FANTASY, and in these fields the pulps had produced writers as celebrated and well loved as Edgar Rice BURROUGHS, Ray CUMMINGS, George Allan ENGLAND, Ralph Milne FARLEY, William Hope HODGSON,A. MERRITT, Sax ROHMER and Garrett P. SERVISS, as well as helped to popularize H.G. WELLS (more commonly published in the slicks) and H. Rider HAGGARD. Many of these writers retain their popularity.The advent ofspecialized pulps did little at first to disturb the hardened pulp writers, who turned from pirate stories to jungle stories, detective stories to sf, etc., with admirable sang-froid, though often with unhappy literary results. It was not until the late 1930s that sf writers in the pulps generally came to see themselves as specialists, concentrating usually on sf, fantasy and horror, and seldom ranging further. (The crossing of genre boundaries is not, however, a rarity among pulp sf and fantasy writers; many have written detective novels, and more recently some have done very well with DISASTER novels.)Nor did the advent of specialized pulps mark the end of sf in the general-fiction pulps. Argosy and BLUE BOOK MAGAZINE, for example, continued in the early 1930s to attract the most popular sf writers, including Burroughs and Farley; Argosy was paying up to 6 cents a word, and Blue Book also paid well,considerably better than the cent or even half-cent a word available from the sf pulps. However, by the end of the 1930s Argosy's rates had dropped to 11/2 cents a word. This marked the effective death of the general-fiction pulp, and probably had a lot to do with the new vigour apparent in such sf pulps as ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION.Although the sf pulps of the 1930s are remembered with great nostalgia by sf fans, the fact is that they formed a very minor portion of the overall pulp-publishing business. The great US pulp-publishing houses, such as Clayton, STREET \& SMITH and Standard, published dozens of titles of whichsf, in terms of number of titles and overall sales, formed only a tiny proportion. Sf as big business had to wait for the post-WWII paperback-book publishing boom (PUBLISHING).Most of the pulp magazines, sf included, had died by the middle 1950s, to be replaced by DIGESTS (SF MAGAZINES) in increasingly unhappy competition with paperback books; also,the reading of stories was itself giving way to the watching of TELEVISION. Indeed, many pulp historians would claim that, despite theproliferation of titles in the 1930s, the heyday of the pulp magazines with their half-million circulations ended with the paper shortages following WWI and the rapidly growing popularity of the CINEMA. The economic depression of the late 1920s probably prolonged the end, bringing with it an urgent need for fiction which escaped the greyness of an ordinary world in which individuals seemed impotent. In the pulps, individuals not only influenced events, they regularly saved the world.A full index of sf and post-1930 fantasy magazines with entries in this volume - including many pulp magazines - is given under SF MAGAZINES. Other periodicals in which sf was published are discussed under BOYS'PAPERS, COMICS, DIME-NOVEL SF and MAGAZINES, the latter entry listing the most important of the general slicks and tabloids which published sf in the period 1890-1940.The following are the general-fiction pulp-magazine entries: The ALL-STORY , The ARGOSY , The BLUE BOOK MAGAZINE , The CAVALIER , The POPULAR MAGAZINE and The SCRAP BOOK . 3 specialized earlypulps given entries are SCIENCE AND INVENTION, THRILL BOOK and WEIRD TALES. A number of 1930s "weird-menace" and science/detective pulps whosesf content was very marginal do not receive entries, with the pious exception of Hugo GERNSBACK's SCIENTIFIC DETECTIVE MONTHLY. There is a small fantasy element in such various genre pulps as Oriental Stories (1930), Golden Fleece Historical Adventure (1938) and Jungle Stories(1938), but the line had to be drawn somewhere in the no-man's-land between sf and fantasy, and they have been omitted. The sf content of the SUPERHERO/supervillain genre is sometimes greater and, though many areomitted - including the extremely popular The Shadow (1931-49), whose sf content was marginal and irregular (but see Walter B. GIBSON for some details) - there are entries for CAPTAIN HAZZARD, CAPTAIN ZERO, DOC SAVAGE MAGAZINE, DR. YEN SIN, DUSTY AYRES AND HIS BATTLE BIRDS, FLASH GORDONSTRANGE ADVENTURE MAGAZINE, G-8 AND HIS BATTLE ACES, The MYSTERIOUS WU FANG , The OCTOPUS , OPERATOR \#5, The SCORPION , The SPIDER and TERENCE X. O'LEARY'S WAR BIRDS.A good account of life as a pulp writer is The Pulp Jungle (1967) by Frank Gruber; books on pulp publishing are Cheap Thrills: An Informal History of the Pulp Magazines (1972) by Ron GOULART, The Fiction Factory, or From Pulp Row to Quality Street: The Story of 100 Years of Publishing at Street \& Smith (1955) by Quentin James Reynolds (1902-1965), and Pulp Voices: Interviews with Pulp Magazine Writers and Editors (chap 1983) ed J.M. Elliot; the feeling of the pulps themselves is captured in The Pulps: 50 Years of American Pop Culture (1970) ed Tony Goodstone; and The Shudder Pulps (1975) by Robert Kenneth Jones is on the"weird-menace" pulps. Also relevant is Yesterday's Faces: A Study of Series Figures in the Early Pulp Magazines: Volume 2: Strange Days (1984) by Robert Sampson, vol 1 being largely about precursors in the dime novels.3. When used metaphorically the word "pulp" describes the quality and style of the fiction published in the pulp magazines - and, by extension, any similar fiction, no matter in what format it was published. The term is still used in this sense today, 40 years after the death ofthe pulps proper. The pulps emphasized action, romance, heroism, success, exotic milieux, fantastic adventures (often with a sprinkling of love interest), and almost invariably a cheerful ending. In literary criticism "pulp" is often taken as a synonym for "stylistically crude", but this wasnot necessarily the case. Good narrative pacing, by no means a negligible quality, was regularly found in the pulps, as were other the virtues of colour, inventiveness, clarity of image and occasional sharp observation, such as might be seen in the work of the early pulp writer Jack LONDON. But it is true that the voracious appetite of the pulp market led to manywriters becoming, in effect, word factories, writing too swiftly and to a cynical formula. The pulps did not generally pay as well for fiction as did the slicks, so economic pressure forced the pulp writer into high productivity.Today the term "pulp sf" is associated primarily with stories written, usually rapidly, for the least intellectual segment of the sf market - packed with adventure but with little emphasis on character, which is usually stereotyped, or on ideas, which are frugally and constantly recycled (CLICHES). Many of the entries in this volume discuss typical pulp-sf themes and modes, including GALACTIC EMPIRES, HEROES, OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM, SEX, SPACE OPERA, SUPERMAN, SWORD AND SORCERY andVILLAINS. On the other hand, not all the fiction published in the pulp magazines was subject to the limitations that the word "pulp" usually suggests. Two famous examples from crime fiction of writers transcending their pulp origins, even while continuing to be published in a pulp format, are Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961) and Raymond Chandler (1888-1959), both associated with Black Mask, and examples from sf are common, too, or else the genre would long ago have died of malnutrition (GOLDEN AGE OF SF).

   PN