5 most significant pulp magazines?

What would be your picks for the 5 most significant pulps? One student of pulp history picks a top 5 including Argosy, Black Mask and Weird Tales. But there's a surprise or two in there.

What would you pick?

Pulp Covers - two recent blog posts

Pulp Covers reimagined:

http://www.jamesblandphotography.com/photography_advice/studio-photography/pulp-magazine-campaign/

Model for the Spicy pulps:

http://benny-drinnon.blogspot.com/2013/08/pulp-similarities.html

Complete Index of Adventure, Blue Book magazines now online at Fictionmags

Included are:

A complete index to Adventure, courtesy of Richard Bleiler who allowed us to use the index he published some years ago.

A complete index to Blue Book Magazine, courtesy of Mike Ashley, Victor Berch & Gene Christie who allowed us to use the unpublished index they compiled between them.

An index to over 900 of the 1114 issues of Short Story Magazine, including all issues from 1922 to the end of the run.

An index to over 1800 issues of Argosy, including almost 600 issues of the "pre-pulp" period, over 1000 issues of the "pulp" period and 250 issues of the "post-pulp" period, as well as a complete index to the British magazine of the same name.

A complete index to Munsey's Magazine.

A complete index to The Cavalier [1908] from the unpublished work of William J. Clark.

An index to the fiction contents of over 600 of the 782 issues of Railroad (Man's) Magazine.

A complete index to the Saturday Evening Post from 1899 to the end of the original run in 1969, courtesy of Mark Owings and Martin Morse Wooster.

All this and MUCH MUCH more at the updated FictionMags Index site.

Pulp magazine statistics from a publisher

This is an excerpt from a letter written by A.A. Wyn in defence of the pulp magazines. It appeared in the New York Times, 04 Sep 1935, and was written in response to a snooty editorial that put down the fiction published in the pulps.

For your information, here are some facts about the pulps.

There are approximately 125 pulp magazines published every month, buying upward of 35,000 tons of paper a year at a cost of approximately $1,500,000.

More than 2,000,000 worth of printing a year.

Approximately $250,000 worth of art work, and another $250,000 of photo engraving a year.

More than 100,000,000 words a year at a cost of more than $1,500,000.

 

The pulp industry contributes to the support of:

 

1. The United States Post Office (of the manuscripts that come In, approximately 1 per cent are usable, so that some 10,000,000,000 words of manuscript make a round trip, and manuscript postage runs high!).
2. Typewriter and typewriter ribbon industries; ink manufacturers; the glue and wire industry (both of them latter are used in binding magazines).
3. Mail-order advertisers.
4. Railroads—2,000 carloads of magazines go out every year and 2,000 car loads of paper come in every year. And it takes approximately five carloads of raw materials to make one carload of paper.
5. National -distributers, wholesalers and dealers of magazines.
6. Second-hand magazine stores, the Salvation Army, which collects and sells old Issues; waste paper dealers.
7. Writer's magazines, literary agents and services.

 

“The story’s the thing”—so must the prehistoric savages in their caves have told some glib story-teller relating his adventures with man and beast in the wilderness when his ingenuity ran dry.

Today, “the story’s the thing” in the pulp magazines, and 30,000,000 Americans can’t be wrong.

Magazine recirculation - life after the newsstand

From the New York Times, Mar 22, 1936:

 

OLD MAGAZINES TRAVEL WIDELY

 

FOR many an old magazine the wastebasket is not, by any means, the end of the trail. Janitors and waste-paper dealers conspire to salvage an amazing proportion of all printed matter not given directly to welfare organizations.

Once reclaimed, periodicals are classified and sold at a price that runs from 35 cents to $4 a hundred pounds; or, by the piece, at 15 cents for the deluxe type and about a quarter of a cent for most of the others.

In the second-hand market pulp magazines make up for the earlier stepchild phase of their existence by taking ascendancy, in at least one respect, over quality-group and popular-group publications. They are the real nomads of the print world; one dealer annually ships a vast quantity to England, whence they journey to the various British colonies.

Next to them in demand are the quality magazines. The popular group rates third and the weeklies a bad fourth.

Foreign Legion stories - great blog

For those of you who are fans of Foreign Legion stories in the pulps, the Mon Legionnaire blog is a gold mine. It has short fiction by Theodore Roscoe, Georges Surdez, Robert Carse and J. D. Newsom.

It  also has a lot of interesting non-fiction articles on the Foreign Legion.

Click here to see only the stories.

Pulp in the mainstream - two sports pulp articles

Two articles on baseball in the pulps (or should that be the baseball pulps). You decide.

Part 1: http://mlb.sbnation.com/2012/11/8/3610582/the-x-collection-part-1-baseballs-pulp-fiction
Part 6: http://mlb.sbnation.com/2013/1/31/3937806/the-x-collection-part-6-more-baseball-pulp-fiction

Have fun.

The rise and fall of the pulps - a timeline

This posting was prompted by Walker Martin's comment on an earlier post:

This is a very interesting question that you present. Can we really say that the pulps were dying in 1942? True ARGOSY ceased as a pulp around this period and became a sort of slick mens magazine. Many pulps decreased their page count and ceased publication because of the war time paper restrictions.
But were they dying in 1942? I would put the date into the postwar period. After WW II I think it became obvious that the readership wasn't there in the high numbers anymore. Certainly by the early 1950's the pulps started to die off and by the end of 1955, just about all were dead except for a few like RANCH ROMANCES, TEXAS RANGERS, AND SCIENCE FICTION QUARTERLY.
By then the digest era was in full bloom. RIP the pulps.

I went back and did some unscientific research on the subject. I took a sample of 37 pulps across different genres - general/adventure, detective, western, love, science fiction, weird, spicy and hero and counted how many pulps were published each year from 1896 to 1972.

The results can be seen in this chart:



The rise and fall of the pulps, a timeline

 

As you can see, the pulps started declining around 1943 (so Walker was right, and I was off by a year), and went into a tailspin in the 1950s. Probably something you already knew, but the exact dates were new to me. If anyone's interested, the data's shared here as an Excel file.

Comments welcome.