History of Love Story Magazine now available (5/28/2012)

Author and longtime Street & Smith editor Daisy Bacon made Love Story Magazine one of the most successful of all pulps, but she was incorrect in one respect when she evaluated the long-running magazine. In her how-to book Love Story Writer (Hermitage 1955), Bacon writes: “During the many years that Love Story enjoyed its large circulation and weekly status it was never successfully imitated, as any circulation man can tell you…”

Bacon’s statement is certainly true with regard to sheer volume. Love Story was published weekly for more than 20 years, starting in September 1922, the only such long-running weekly romance pulp. The Adventure House Guide to the Pulps lists the magazine’s overall run as 1,158 issues, published from August 1921 through February 1947, and that’s no surprise — only Street & Smith had the financial wherewithal to publish a romance pulp on a weekly basis, not to mention weekly western and detective pulps as well…

Read the fuller history of this title here at the Pulp Magazines Project.

The Pulp Magazines Project wishes to thank Michelle Nolan for contributing her history of Love Story. Check out Michelle’s books, Love on the Racks: A History of American Romance Comics (2008) and Ball Tales (2010), a study of baseball, basketball and football fiction from 1930 to 1960.

Archive Reaches 78 Issues

The Pulp Magazines Project is well on the way to posting its 100th individual issue. As of April 2012, there are over 75 magazines available on the website as high-quality, full-text, cover-to-cover scans. They represent 40 different titles from 22 publishers, 16 magazine editors, over a dozen genres, and hundreds of individual authors. There are stories by John Buchan, Djuna Barnes, H.G. Wells, Rider Haggard, Albert Payson Terhune, Robert E. Howard, H.P. Lovecraft, Robert Bloch, Ray Cummings, A.L. Burkholder, Seabury Quinn, Blasco Ibanez, H. Bedford Jones, Baroness Orczy, and Captain Dingle. There are adventure, romance, western, SF, sea, aviation, weird, horror, sport, detective, and girlie pulps. We have Teddy Roosevelt’s favorite pulp, Adventure, and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s favorite pulp, Detective Story. There are British pulps, East Coast pulps, and pulps published in Chicago. There are long-running pulp titles like Argosy and Ranch Romances, and there are one-shot flops like Basketball Stories.

Importantly, they show the dizzying variety of fiction, poetry, and even non-fiction that was published for over half a century in the pulp magazines. And these are just the beginning.

Magazines now available on the Project’s website include:

Love Story Magazine (Mar. 10 and Oct. 20, 1934; Mar. 30, 1935); “I Confess” (Jan. 12, 1923); Ranch Romances (Sept. 1, 1933; Mar. 1, 1943; and Feb. 11, 1944); Amazing Stories (April 1928); The Argosy (Nov. 1908; Albert Payson Terhune, From Flag to Flag, Pt. 1/4); Sea Stories Magazine (August 1929); Western Story Magazine (June 5, 1926); Out of this World Adventures (July and Dec. 1950); Planet Stories (Fall 1944); Jungle Stories (Summer 1950); Indian Stories (Winter 1950); Ghost Stories (Jan. 1927); Basketball Stories (Winter 1937); Argosy All-Story Weekly (Oct. 21, 1922; Ray Cummings, The Fire People, Pt. 1/5); All-Story Weekly (June 19, 1920; Ray Cummings, The Light Machine); The Frontier (May 1926); Detective Story Magazine (Aug. 27, 1921); Adventure (Oct. 1915; Albert Payson Terhune, From the ‘Tip’ of the Rocket); Hutchinson’s Story Magazine (UK; July 1919; Rider Haggard, She Meets Allan, Pt. 1/9); The Merry Magazine (UK; March 1929); Wonder Stories (Dec. 1930; Jan.-Aug. 1931; Oct. 1931; Aug. 1932); Amazing Stories (Oct.-Nov. 1926); Amazing Stories (April-Sept. 1926); Famous Fantastic Mysteries (Aug./ Oct.-Dec. 1939); Fight Stories (June 1928, Sept. 1930, and Aug./ Oct. 1949); Flying Stories (May 1929); Thrilling Adventures (July 1932); Weird Tales (Aug./ Sept. 1936; REH, Red Nails, Pt. 2/3); Weird Tales (July 1937); Weird Tales (Feb. 1938; REH, Haunting Columns); Air Stories (August 1927; 1st Aviation Pulp); Astounding Stories (Feb. 1932; Ray Cummings, Wandl, The Invader, Pt. 1/4); Frontier Stories (May 1927); Breezy Stories (March 1916); Green Book (March 1912); Short Stories (Aug. 10, 1926); World Fiction (Nov. 1922; Blasco Ibanez, A Wedding Serenade); Wonder Stories (Aug. 1934; A.L. Burkholder, Dimensional Fate); Ginger Stories (Feb. 1930); Amazing Stories (Dec. 1926; H.G. Wells, The First Men in the Moon [r], Pt. 1/3); Detective Story Magazine (Mar. 5, 1916); Live Stories (May 1919); Snappy Stories (Mar. 3, 1916) New Story (July 1914; H. Bedford Jones, A Discord in Avalon); People’s Story (Nov. 25, 1922; Captain Dingle, The Redheads); The All-Story Weekly (June 5, 1915; John Buchan, The Thirty-Nine Steps, Pt. 1/2); Top-Notch Magazine (October 17, 1917); Adventure (Aug. 3, 1919; Baroness Orczy, Needs Must); The Argosy (Aug. 1905; Albert Payson Terhune, The Fugitive, Pt. 1/4); Blue Book (Aug. 1916); The Cavalier Weekly (Sept. 28, 1912); and The Popular Magazine (December 1908; H.G. Wells, Tono-Bungay, Pt. 4/5).

The Pulp Magazines Project wishes to thank the Pulpscans Group, Digital Pulp Preservation, the Digital Comic Museum, Newsstand: 1925, and Conrad First for all their help.

Cheers everybody, keep on scanning, and enjoy pulps.

New Issues (3/22/2012): Wonder Stories

We’ve added several new issues of Wonder Stories to the Pulp Magazines Project website, including those for Dec. 1930; Jan.-April 1931; June-Aug. 1931; Oct. 1931; and Aug. 1932.

Ten new issues in all (nearly an entire run for 1931):

PDFs have also been fixed/ optimized throughout the site; they should be downloading 2-3x faster than before. Cheers.

History of Astounding Stories now available (2/21/2012)

Inspired by the success of Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories, Clayton Publishing Co. released, in January of 1930, the first issue of Astounding Stories. Early issues lacked much of Gernsback’s attention to the scientific and extrapolative possibilities of the SF genre, and instead featured many instances of stock, pulp adventure yarns simply transplanted into exotic or alien environments. While possibly a travesty in the eyes of SF purists, it attracted many SF fans and general pulp readers, and aided Astounding‘s first three years of survival, until its cancellation during the height of the Great Depression in March of 1933.

Thankfully, the departure was short-lived; the pulp industry giant Street & Smith Corp. purchased the title, and in October 1933 Astounding Stories returned. The stock adventure stories that had appeared previously were replaced, with what editor F. Orlin Tremaine dubbed “thought-variants:” stories that were just as interesting and exciting, but also held some scientific or technological truth at their core. This approach—combining the adventure of the pulps with the ideas of Gernsbackian extrapolation—in addition to the social, political and introspective elements increasingly incorporated by its authors into their stories, would help define Astounding in the coming years…

Read the fuller history of this title here at the Pulp Magazines Project.

New Issues/ Histories (2/18/2012)

Due to an overwhelmingly positive response received last weekend to the posting of issues 1-6 (over 4,000 new visits in just three days), we’ve added two more issues from Volume 1 of Amazing Stories, those of October and November. This rounds out the year 1926 for Hugo Gernsback’s seminal science-fiction magazine.

Also available now at the Pulp Magazines Project, from Andrew Ferguson (University of Virginia) a history of Amazing Stories; and from Jeremy Larance (West Liberty University) a history of Fiction House’s Fight Stories, the first all-fiction pulp magazine dedicated entirely to a single sport. Take that, baseball.

New Issues (2/10/2012): Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories 1-6

We’ve added yet another significant milestone to the Pulp Magazines Project website: issues #1-6 of Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories (April-Sept. 1926), the first periodical of any kind devoted solely to science fiction, or, as Gernsback coined the term, “scientifiction.”

Publisher of over 50 magazines during his lifetime, Gernsback is considered by many to be “The Father of Magazine Science Fiction.” In 1923, when a special all-fiction issue of Science and Invention (which Gernsback edited, 1920-29) received an overwhelmingly positive response from its readers, Gernsback realized the market potential for an all-fiction scientific magazine.

Three years later, Gernsback launched Amazing Stories, which remains to this day one of the most highly respected and collectible pulps of any genre. In its inaugural issue, Gernsback explained his aim for the magazine:

By ‘scientifiction’ I mean the Jules Verne, H.G. Wells and Edgar Alan Poe type of story—a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision. […] Not only do these amazing tales make tremendously interesting reading—they are also always instructive.  They supply knowledge that we might not otherwise obtain—and they supply it in a very palatable form. For the best of these modern writers of scientifiction have the knack of imparting knowledge and even inspiration without once making us aware that we are being taught (“A New Sort of Magazine,” Vol. 1, No. 1, April 1926, p.3).

A hearty thanks to Beau Collier, Pulpscans, and the Pulps Preservation Project for making these issues available. Enjoy.

New Issues/ History/ Contexts (1/22/2012)

We’ve added 5 new titles to the Pulp Magazines Project website: Famous Fantastic Mysteries (Sept/ Oct 1939, Nov. 1939, and Dec 1939); Fight Stories (June 1928, Sept 1930, and Aug/ Oct 1949); Flying Stories (May 1929, 1st issue of Vol. 2); Thrilling Adventures (July 1932); and Weird Tales (Aug/ Sept 1936, July 1937, and February 1938).

Eleven new issues in all (ranging in pub. dates from 1929 to 1949):

Also available at the Pulp Magazines Project, the history of Weird Tales (Leif Sorensen; Colorado State University) and two new Contexts pages: Pulp Market Share 1922 (Jess Nevins; World Fantasy Award-nominated Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana, 2005) and an Office Dummy, or prototype, issue of Flying Stories Vol. 2, No. 1 (May 1929).

History of Air Stories now available (1/20/2012)

In May 1927 Charles Lindbergh made his world-famous solo flight across the Atlantic, catapulting himself (and The Spirit of St. Louis) into the history books and America into an “air-minded” frenzy. The “golden era” of aviation fiction had begun. In the next five years, 148 aviation series and dozens of aviation pulps like Air Trails, Air Adventures, Dare-Devil Aces, Flying Aces, Sky Trails, and Wings would come into print.

Amid stiff competition, Fiction House’s Air Stories, edited by Jack B. Kelly (1927-1932) and Malcolm Reiss (1937-1939), held a unique bragging right; its first issue appeared in August 1927, making it “The First Air Story Magazine!” as prominently advertised on many of the magazine’s covers…

For the fuller history of this title, click here.

History of Detective Story Magazine now available; New Contexts (12/10/2011)

With its premiere issue on October 5, 1915, Street & Smith’s Detective Story Magazine became the first of many pulp magazines to devote itself entirely to the genre of crime fiction. Born out of the early nickel paper Nick Carter Weekly, Detective Story published from 1915 until the summer of 1949 a total of 1,057 issues, a longer run than any other detective pulp in history…

For a brief history of this seminal magazine, click here.

Also available at the Pulp Magazines Project, new Contexts pages featuring publishers’ Index Card Files, Rejection Letters, and Canceled Checks for pulp magazine purchases, authors, and serials from WWI to the late 1940s.

New Issues/ Contexts (12/3/2011)

We’ve added three important new titles/ issues to the Pulp Magazines Project website: Air Stories, August 1927 (1st issue of the 1st aviation pulp); Astounding Stories, February 1932 (the 1st true science-fiction pulp); and Frontier Stories, May 1927 (launched in 1924, this pulp featured stories from the American Colonial “frontier” to the jungles of Borneo and South America).

Also available at the Pulp Magazines Project, annual circulation figures for pulp magazines published in the US between 1900 and 1922; and an essay on pulp and paper production, “So What Is Pulp?”, by Beau Collier of Darwination Scans.