Jan 10 2010
Nifty Pulp Site
Many of you know that I am a major fan of old pulp magazines of all types. While writing Star Trek, I got to write Captain Proton a number of times, including a cover story for Amazing Magazine. Great fun.
And I used to be a pulp collector, a pretty major one, until a house fire destroyed them all, including a full run of Astounding from issue #1. After seeing them hosed down on my front lawn, I couldn’t collect them anymore. But that didn’t mean I didn’t stop loving them.
PHANTOM DETECTIVE – July 1937
The above is a cover of an Adventure House Pulp Replica. That’s right, replica. Now this company is reprinting completely, with permission, including the ads, the entire contents of major pulps of all types. Mystery, science fiction, air-war, romance, you name it.
A dealer friend of mine is selling them and has a large collection of them at http://home.earthlink.net/~wtrojan/Reprints/advhouse.htm You have to scan down to get to the pictures and authors in each magazine, since he opens the site with a kind of table of contents, but if you want to see pulp magazines you had no idea even existed, scan down through his site. The replicas normally retail for about $14.95 each, but I think he’s selling them for less.
And you don’t even want to think about what it would cost to buy some of these actual pulps on the open market. So much, you wouldn’t think about taking them out of the bag, that’s for sure. Pulp collectors will think nothing at times of spending a thousand bucks or more for one magazine. Some of these only have a half dozen copies left in existence thanks to the paper drives of WWII.
SPICY MYSTERY STORIES – May 1936 – Robert Leslie Bellem, H J Ward cover
But even if you aren’t interested in buying any of the replicas, just scanning down through the site, seeing the lists of stories in every volume, looking at the fantastic covers is something every writer should do. It will certainly open your eyes to a lot of things like how fleeting fiction can be at times, and how really nifty some of the stuff done in the great pulp era really was.
Take a look. You will be glad you did.
Cheers, Dean
I physically winced at the image of your collection being hosed down. Brutal.
The more I look at the pre 1970’s magazines the more jealous I become of writers back then–*those* are the kind of stories I’d love to be writing and submitting to pro markets.
Can’t seem to find too many publications going for that noir, pulp, adventure angle these days even though Weird Tales is still hanging around in one incarnation or another. Ellery Queen I guess.
Anyway, good stuff.
I love the artwork on the old pulp magazines. That may be because my favourite genres all were published as pulps. That particular era, however, was certainly before my time.
‘Spicy Mystery Stories’… Covers with scantily-clad women… Guys with guns, wearing fedoras…. I have to agree with nathan, this looks like fun stuff!
For Christmas, I got the “Dangerous Dames 2010″ calendar with a dozen classic pulp art book covers (“Spicy Mystery,” “Spicy Adventure,” “Spicy Detective,” etc.) reproduced, poster-size.
Of course, I hung it in my writing office — great fun!