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Pulp magazines were inexpensive fiction magazines that were published from 1896 through the 1960s. 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. Pulps were the successors to the penny dreadfuls, dime novels, and short-fiction magazines of the 19th century.
The dime novel is a form of late 19th-century and early 20th-century U.S. popular fiction issued in series of inexpensive paperbound editions. The term dime novel has been used as a catchall term for several different but related forms, referring to story papers, five- and ten-cent weeklies, "thick book" reprints, and sometimes early pulp magazines. The term was used as a title as late as 1940, in the short-lived pulp magazine Western Dime Novels. In the modern age, the term dime novel has been used to refer to quickly written, lurid potboilers, usually as a pejorative to describe a sensationalized but superficial literary work.
The Avenger is a fictional character whose original adventures appeared between September 1939 and September 1942 in the pulp magazine The Avenger, published by Street & Smith, which ran 24 issues. Five additional short stories were published in Clues Detective magazine (1942–1943), and a sixth novelette in The Shadow magazine in 1943. Decades later, newly written pastiches were commissioned and published by Warner Brothers' Paperback Library from 1973 to 1974.
Nick Carter is a fictional character who began as a dime novel private detective in 1886 and has appeared in a variety of formats over more than a century. The character was first conceived by Ormond G. Smith and created by John R. Coryell. Carter headlined his own magazine for years, and was then part of a long-running series of novels from 1964 to 1990. Films were created based on Carter in France, Czechoslovakia and Hollywood. Nick Carter has also appeared in many comic books and in radio programs.
Ernest James Haycox was an American writer of Western fiction.
Street & Smith or Street & Smith Publications, Inc., was a New York City publisher specializing in inexpensive paperbacks and magazines referred to as dime novels and pulp fiction. They also published comic books and sporting yearbooks. Among their many titles was the science fiction pulp magazine Astounding Stories, acquired from Clayton Magazines in 1933, and retained until 1961. Street & Smith was founded in 1855, and was bought out in 1959. The Street & Smith headquarters were at 79 Seventh Avenue in Manhattan; they were designed by Henry F. Kilburn.
Popular Publications was one of the largest publishers of pulp magazines during its existence, at one point publishing 42 different titles per month. Company titles included detective, adventure, romance, and Western fiction. They were also known for the several 'weird menace' titles. They also published several pulp hero or character pulps.
A Dime Western is a modern term for Western-themed dime novels, which spanned the era of the 1860s–1900s. Most would hardly be recognizable as a modern western, having more in common with James Fennimore Cooper's Leatherstocking saga, but many of the standard elements originated here: a cool detached hero, a frontiersman, a fragile heroine in danger of the despicable outlaw, savage Indians, violence and gunplay, and the final outcome where Truth and Light wins over all. Often real characters — such as Buffalo Bill or the famous Kit Carson — were fictionalized, as were the exploits of notorious outlaws such as Billy the Kid and Jesse James. Buffalo Bill's literary incarnation provides the transition from the frontier tales to the cowboy story, as he straddles both of the genres.
Frank Reade was the protagonist of a series of dime novels published primarily for boys. The first novel, Frank Reade and His Steam Man of the Plains, an imitation of Edward Ellis's The Steam Man of the Prairies (1868), was written by Harry Enton and serialized in the Frank Tousey juvenile magazine Boys of New York, February 28 through April 24, 1876. The four Frank Reade stories concerned adventures with the character's inventions, various robot-like mechanisms powered by steam.
Detective Story Magazine was an American magazine published by Street & Smith from October 15, 1915, to summer 1949. It was one of the first pulp magazines devoted to detective fiction and consisted of short stories and serials. While the publication was the publishing house's first detective-fiction pulp magazine in a format resembling a modern paperback, Street & Smith had only recently ceased publication of the dime-novel series Nick Carter Weekly, which concerned the adventures of a young detective.
Luis Philip Senarens was an American dime novel writer specializing in science fiction, once called "the American Jules Verne".
Joseph Allan Elphinstone Dunn, best known as J. Allan Dunn, was one of the high-producing writers of the American pulp magazines. He published well over a thousand stories, novels, and serials from 1914 to 1941. He first made a name for himself in Adventure. At the request of Adventure editor Arthur Sullivant Hoffman, Dunn wrote Barehanded Castaways, a novel about people trapped on a desert island which was intended to avoid the usual cliches of such stories. Barehanded Castaways was serialised in 1921 and was well received by Adventure's readers. Well over half of his output appeared in Street & Smith pulps, including People's, Complete Story Magazine, and Wild West Weekly. Dunn wrote over a thousand stories. He wrote approximately 470 stories for Wild West Weekly alone. His main genres were adventure and western; although he did write a number of detective stories, most of them appearing in Detective Fiction Weekly and Dime Detective. Dunn wrote The Treasure of Atlantis, a science fiction story about survivals from Atlantis living in the Brazilian jungle. The Treasure of Atlantis was published in All-Around Magazine in 1916 and later reprinted in 1970. He was a specialist in South Sea stories, and pirate stories. He also published a lot of juvenile fiction; including many stories for Boys' Life, primarily in the 1920s. A number of his novel-length stories were reprinted in hardbound, some under the pen name "Joseph Montague" for Street & Smith's Chelsea House imprint; many of his books were issued in the United Kingdom. His stories were frequently syndicated in newspapers, both in America and around the world, making him, for a time, a very widely known author.
The Shadow was an American pulp magazine that was published by Street & Smith from 1931 to 1949. Each issue contained a novel about the Shadow, a mysterious crime-fighting figure who had been invented to narrate the introductions to radio broadcasts of stories from Street & Smith's Detective Story Magazine. A line from the introduction, "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows", prompted listeners to ask at newsstands for the "Shadow magazine", which convinced the publisher that a magazine based around a single character could be successful. Walter Gibson persuaded the magazine's editor, Frank Blackwell, to let him write the first novel, The Living Shadow, which appeared in the first issue, dated April 1931.
Fame and Fortune Weekly: Stories of Boys Who Make Money (1905–1929) was an American periodical for children published by Frank Tousey in New York which had 1197 weekly issues.
Golden Days for Boys and Girls was a late 19th-century children's story paper, distributed weekly as an accompaniment to the paper Saturday Night. Running from March 6, 1880, to May 11, 1907, Golden Days cost subscribers $3 a year. It was the brainchild of newspaperman James Elverson (1838–1911), who later owned the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Frank Tousey (1853–1902) was among the top five publishers of dime novels in the late 19th-century and early 20th-century. Based in New York, his sensationalism drew a large audience of youth, hungry for scenes of daring and tormented heroes and damsels in distress. Of particular notice in his approach to the 'blood and thunder' genre were the vivid cover illustrations of his dime novels, which were consistently larger and more thrilling than previous publications. Although focused on fictional weeklies, Tousey managed a variety of materials over time, including some handbooks, gossip sheets, and even a newspaper on current events in the Spanish–American War.
The Chicago Ledger was a story paper published in Chicago, Illinois from 1872 until 1924. Put out by the Ledger Company and edited by Samuel H. Williams, the Ledger was a boilerplate literary magazine. Such periodicals were printed using engraved steel sheets. The plates, or casts of them, were then sent out to be printed and inserted into other newspapers. Ledger subscriptions originally sold for $1 for 52 issues and, by 1879, the paper had a circulation of 10,000. Although begun as a literary paper of "a good class," the Ledger eventually became more melodramatic in tone. In his 1910 book, Newspapers and Periodicals of Illinois, Franklin Scott, notes that "[t]he sensational, although not immoral, character of the Ledger stories, and the use that the large mail-order houses have made of its advertising columns, have given this paper an unusually long life and extensive circulation."
Pluck and Luck: Complete Stories of Adventure was an American dime novel first published by Frank Tousey and was the longest-running dime novel. It numbered 1605 issues from January 12, 1898 to March 5, 1929. The 32-page magazine was semi-monthly for the first 22 issues and then weekly. Its size was 8 x 11 inches and 6 x 9 inches thereafter, and it featured color covers. Issues 1002 to 1464 were published by Harry Wolff and the rest by Westbury.
The Spider was an American pulp magazine published by Popular Publications from 1933 to 1943. Every issue included a lead novel featuring The Spider, a heroic crime-fighter. The magazine was intended as a rival to Street & Smith's The Shadow and Standard Magazine's The Phantom Detective, which also featured crime-fighting heroes. The novels in the first two issues were written by R. T. M. Scott; thereafter every lead novel was credited to "Grant Stockbridge", a house name. Norvell Page, a prolific pulp author, wrote most of these; almost all the rest were written by Emile Tepperman and A. H. Bittner. The novel in the final issue was written by Prentice Winchell.
References
- ↑ "Wild West Weekly (Western)". Comic Book Plus.
- ↑ Young Wild West: the prince of the saddle. Frank Tousey.
- ↑ "Young Wild West: the prince of the saddle". digital.lib.usf.edu.
- ↑ "Wild West Weekly". University of South Florida Libraries Digital Collections.
- ↑ "Wild West Weekly archives". onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu.
- 1 2 Cottrill, Tim. Bookery's Guide to Pulps and Related Magazines, 1888-1969. Bookery Press, Fairborn, OH, 2005. (pp. 277-78)
- ↑ "Mass Market Appeal (16 of 19)". bancroft.berkeley.edu.
- ↑ "Young Wild West's Weird West Weekly, a 1915 dime novel. | jessnevins.com".
