Pulp magazines 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 7 inches (18 cm) wide by 10 inches (25 cm) high, and 0.5 inches (1.3 cm) thick, with ragged, untrimmed edges.
Sword and sorcery (S&S) is a subgenre of fantasy characterized by sword-wielding heroes engaged in exciting and violent adventures. Elements of romance, magic, and the supernatural are also often present. Unlike works of high fantasy, the tales, though dramatic, focus on personal battles rather than world-endangering matters. Sword and sorcery commonly overlaps with heroic fantasy.
Donald M. Grant, Publisher, Inc. is a fantasy and science fiction small press publisher in New Hampshire that was founded in 1964. It is notable for publishing fantasy and horror novels with lavish illustrations, most notably Stephen King's The Dark Tower series and the King/Peter Straub novel The Talisman.
Adventure fiction is a type of fiction that usually presents danger, or gives the reader a sense of excitement. Some adventure fiction also satisfies the literary definition of romance fiction.
Lois & Clark: A Superman Novel is a superhero fiction novel by American science fiction and fantasy writer C. J. Cherryh. It is based on the television series Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman and is about the romance between Superman universe characters Lois Lane and Clark Kent.
Blue Book was a popular 20th-century American magazine with a lengthy 70-year run under various titles from 1905 to 1975. It was a sibling magazine to The Red Book Magazine and The Green Book Magazine.
Marc Gascoigne is a British author and editor.
Earthman's Burden is a collection of science fiction stories by American writers Poul Anderson and Gordon R. Dickson. It was first published by Gnome Press in 1957. The story "Don Jones" was original to this collection. The other stories originally appeared in the magazines Other Worlds, Universe and Fantasy and Science Fiction.
Fedogan & Bremer is a weird fiction specialty publishing house founded in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1985 by Philip Rahman and Dennis Weiler. The name comes from the nicknames of the two founders when they were in college.
Purple Pirate is a fantasy novel by author Talbot Mundy. It was first published in 1935 by Appleton-Century. Parts of the story appeared in the magazine Adventure.
Slaves of Sleep is a science fantasy novel by American writer L. Ron Hubbard. It was first published in book form in 1948 by Shasta Publishers; the novel originally appeared in 1939 in an issue of the magazine Unknown. The novel presents a story in which a man travels to a parallel universe ruled by Ifrits. The protagonist takes on the identity of a human in this dimension, and becomes involved in the politics of Ifrits in this fictional "Arabian Nights" world.
Fantasy Publishing Company, Inc., or FPCI, was an American science fiction and fantasy small press specialty publishing company established in 1946. It was the fourth small press company founded by William L. Crawford.
Henry James O'Brien Bedford-Jones was a Canadian-American historical, adventure fantasy, science fiction, crime and Western writer who became a naturalized United States citizen in 1908.
The Three Palladins is a novel of historical fiction by Harold Lamb. It was first published in book form in 1977 by Donald M. Grant, Publisher, Inc. in an edition of 1,350 copies. The novel originally appeared in the magazine Adventure in 1923.
The Sea of the Ravens is a novel of historical fiction by Harold Lamb and illustrators George Barr, and Alicia Austin. It was first published in stand-alone book form in 1983 by Donald M. Grant, Publisher, Inc. in an edition of 1,925 copies of which 200 were specially bound and signed by the artists. The novel originally appeared in Adventure in 1927. It was published with its prequel and sequel novels with new linking sections by Doubleday in 1931.
Post Oaks & Sand Roughs is a semi-autobiographical adventure novel by Robert E. Howard. It was first published in 1989 in France by NéO under the title of "Le Rebelle", since 1990 by Donald M. Grant, Publisher, Inc. in an edition of 850 copies. The book contains an introduction and appendix by Glenn Lord where Lord identifies the real people who appear as thinly disguised characters in the novel.
Kenneth Adrian Bedford, better known under the pseudonym of K. A. Bedford, is an Australian writer of science fiction.
The Thrill Book was a U.S. pulp magazine published by Street & Smith in 1919. It was intended to carry "different" stories: this meant stories that were unusual or unclassifiable, which in practice often meant the stories were fantasy or science fiction. The first eight issues, edited by Harold Hersey, were a mixture of adventure and weird stories. Contributors included Greye La Spina, Charles Fulton Oursler, J. H. Coryell, and Seabury Quinn. Hersey was replaced by Ronald Oliphant with the July 1 issue, probably because Street & Smith were unhappy with his performance.
Two Complete Science-Adventure Books was an American pulp science fiction magazine, published by Fiction House, which lasted for eleven issues between 1950 and 1954 as a companion to Planet Stories. Each issue carried two novels or long novellas. It was initially intended to carry only reprints, but soon began to publish original stories. Contributors included Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Poul Anderson, John Brunner, and James Blish. The magazine folded in 1954, almost at the end of the pulp era.
Science-fiction and fantasy magazines began to be published in the United States in the 1920s. Stories with science-fiction themes had been appearing for decades in pulp magazines such as Argosy, but there were no magazines that specialized in a single genre until 1915, when Street & Smith, one of the major pulp publishers, brought out Detective Story Magazine. The first magazine to focus solely on fantasy and horror was Weird Tales, which was launched in 1923, and established itself as the leading weird fiction magazine over the next two decades; writers such as H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard became regular contributors. In 1926 Weird Tales was joined by Amazing Stories, published by Hugo Gernsback; Amazing printed only science fiction, and no fantasy. Gernsback included a letter column in Amazing Stories, and this led to the creation of organized science-fiction fandom, as fans contacted each other using the addresses published with the letters. Gernsback wanted the fiction he printed to be scientifically accurate, and educational, as well as entertaining, but found it difficult to obtain stories that met his goals; he printed "The Moon Pool" by Abraham Merritt in 1927, despite it being completely unscientific. Gernsback lost control of Amazing Stories in 1929, but quickly started several new magazines. Wonder Stories, one of Gernsback's titles, was edited by David Lasser, who worked to improve the quality of the fiction he received. Another early competitor was Astounding Stories of Super-Science, which appeared in 1930, edited by Harry Bates, but Bates printed only the most basic adventure stories with minimal scientific content, and little of the material from his era is now remembered.
