A Onetime American Passion

Printed magazines were popular in America during the early 19th and 20th Century.  Notable examples are Harper’s Bazaar, National Geographic, Time, Life and Reader’s Digest.  Besides those mainstream magazines there were pulp magazines that also had large circulations. Unfortunately, most Americans today are not aware of what were the more popular pulp magazines.

Pulp magazines started as a few tinted pages on inexpensive pulp paper, thus the name.  (Better magazines printed on higher quality paper were called glossies or slicks.) Because they were cheap to publish and, thus, inexpensive to buy, they had a wide circulation. That does not mean the contents were inferior . . . . . au contraire.

The first pulp magazine was Argosy Magazine, printed in 1896 by Frank Munsey. It was about 135,000 words on 192 pages per issue.  The pages were not trimmed and there were no inside illustrations. It was the outgrowth of The Golden Argosy, a newspaper type publication with children’s stories. Munsey, who was the editor, opted to shortened the name to just The Argosy after the original publisher went bankrupt. (For those who may not know, argosy refers to a large merchant ship and/or a rich supply of something. The Golden Argosy was just one of approximately 60 publishers that used stories written by Horatio Alger, Jr.)

In addition to the name change, the magazine also shifted its focus to an adventure story magazine for young boys and men.

Street &  Smith Publishing was next to distribute pulp magazines.  Its first product, The Popular Magazine, was launched in 1903 with trimmed pages and inside illustrations, along with an illustrated cover. Competitors quickly followed suit.

Two popular pulp magazines in the 1900s were Adventure and Detective Story Magazine, published by Ridgway Company, a subsidiary of Butterick Publishing Company, and Street & Smith Publishing, respectively. Ridgway also published other pulp magazines, two concatenations were Romance and Everybody’s Magazine.  These publishers had an amalgamation of writers that supplied the stories needed to meet the ongoing demand.   

Adventure Magazine

Adventure magazine was first published in 1910 under the watchful eyes of Trumbull White, its first editor. White was succeeded a few years later by Arthur Sullivant Hoffman who edited the magazine until 1927.

Hoffman’s assistant for a few years was Sinclair Lewis. Lewis graduated from Yale University in 1908, traveled to Panama for a time, returned to America and was living in a cooperative-living colony in New Jersey before becoming known as a writer.  Lewis also enrolled in the Socialist Party during this venturesome period of his life.  Inexplicably, Lewis decided to shed his Bohemian lifestyle and move to New York in 1910 to work for Frederick A. Stokes Company.

After two years working for Stokes, Lewis left to work for Hoffman; he would have been age 27 at the time. The Stokes Company went on to publish best sellers such as The Story of Ferdinand, Guys and Dolls, and Doctor Dolittle.

Many writers gained prominence writing for pulp magazines, and so did various artists and illustrators. The demand for front cover art that tantalized the reader and inside illustrations that retained the reader’s interest were in high demand. Of course, the best known illustrator is Norman Rockwell, but there were others, such as Maxfield Parrish.

Some publishers created art departments to generate their own illustrations. The cover of the first issue of Adventure magazine is a perfect example.

During the 1940s, many of the fictional crime stories and articles were connected with World War II, but as times changed so did the magazine. In 1953, the Adventure’s management decided to shift its theme to a men’s adventure magazine, issues of which are not valued by vintage magazine collectors. Adventure even resorted to printing black & white photos of semi-nude women, but that reincarnation also failed to positively impact sales and the magazine eventually stopped publishing in 1971.  That is a sad end to a magazine that Newsweek magazine declared was the “Dean of the pulps.”

If you are interested in learning more about Arthur S. Hoffman, an icon of pulp magazine history, this webpage is recommended:

https://pulpflakes.blogspot.com/2012/05/arthur-s-hoffmanbiography-of-editor-of.html

Detective Story Magazine

Another pulp magazine was Detective Story Magazine, credited as being the first pulp magazine devoted solely to detective stories.  It was actually the continuation of Nick Carter Stories, a dime novel, private detective series that started in 1886.

Detective Story Magazine was a weekly pulp magazine for half of its over 30 years of publication, eventually dropping to quarterly issuance toward the end of its distribution.  During World War II, Detective Story Magazine printed an “overseas edition” that was produced for the Allied Forces. The American edition ceased publication in 1949; however, a British reprint version was published until 1954.

Starting in July 1930, The Detective Story Hour, a spinoff of the magazine, was broadcast on radio. It was narrated by the mystifying voice known as The Shadow. The listening audience was so mesmerized by The Shadow that Street & Smith published a magazine called The Shadow Magazine in April 1931. Recordings of The Shadow radio broadcast are available even today.

Americans continue to be enticed by true and fictional crime stories. All a consumer has to do is find one of the several true crime TV broadcasts on legacy television networks or connect to one of the many  streaming services to have their fill of alluring crime stories in video format. And, of course, there are the dozens of print, ebooks and audio books published and produced each year in the crime genre.  The consumer market has a voracious appetite for tales about crime. Kimberly Tilley’s books are a great examples of the popularity of true crime novels.