PulpFest

Archive - April 2014

Amazing Stories

It was hard to miss the first issue of Amazing Stories on the newsstand. Letter-size, larger than the typical pulp magazine, with three-dimensional block letters trailing across its masthead and a bright yellow backdrop...

Science and Invention

Called “The Barnum of the Space Age” by Life magazine in 1963, Hugo Gernsback emigrated to the United States in 1904. Soon thereafter, he founded a company to import electrical equipment and began producing a catalog...

The Unique Magazine

Weird Tales was the first periodical specifically devoted to the fantasy genre. Premiering in early 1923, its publishers envisioned “The Unique Magazine” as a place for a writer to be given “free rein to express his...

The Munsey Magazines

Shortly after The Argosy had been converted to the first all-fiction magazine in 1896, and not long thereafter the first pulp magazine, its circulation had doubled to about 80,000 copies per issue. By 1907, the year the...

A Magazine for the Common Man

We have seen that the popular British fiction magazines were modeled after the illustrated periodicals of America. However, unlike their British counterparts, the leading American magazines of the late nineteenth...

Prelude to the Pulps

As we learned in our April 4th post, “Origins of Science Fiction,” magazines began to reach a much wider audience as Europe and America became more industrialized. Increasingly urban and literate societies...