#pulp magazines

“Madame Pythagoras”

Space base. New Worlds. September 1954. "Hutchins," ill.

Internet Archive

The Shadow, June 1, 1940 (Shadow Magazine #199): “The Scent of Death.” Graves Gladney cover art.

An S-tier of men's magazines would have two titles: Fawcett is TRUE and Popular Publications' ARGOSY. They were the ones with slick pages, full-color illustrations, and ads for credible brands. TRUE was born a men's magazine, while ARGOSY became one. It dated back to 1882 and by the 1920s it was a weekly pulp magazine. It was, to be more exact, one of the "big four" general-interest pulps, along with ADVENTURE, BLUE BOOK and SHORT STORIES. These weren't genre-specific like BLACK MASK (crime) and WEIRD TALES (horror/fantasy) and so don't enjoy those two's lofty historic reputation as laboratories for genre creation. The people who wrote for ARGOSY aren't in the literary canon like Hammett, Chandler and Lovecraft, but many were immensely popular in their time, e.g. Edgar Rice Burroughs, Max Brand, A. Merritt, etc. ARGOSY in its peak pulp form is awesome in retrospect: 144 pages of fiction across the genre map, including novelettes, short stories and multiple serials every week, with writers waiting for rediscovery or reappraisal.

But the Munsey company bled ARGOSY dry by 1942, sacrificing their flagship title to a hare-brained self-destructive brand expansion. The page count started dropping in 1938. In early 1941 it switched from standard pulp format to magazine ( or "bedsheet") format, having already given up cover art in favor of a generic cover design, presumably for the sake of good taste. By fall 1941 it was no longer weekly. In early 1942 it went from biweekly to monthly. Munsey clearly meant to turn ARGOSY into a men's magazine on the model of TRUE (while retaining fiction) and brought back original cover art, of a sort. The results were unattractive.

By the end of 1942 ARGOSY was done for. Popular Publications, probably the top pulp publisher of the time -- best known for hero pulps like THE SPIDER and G-8 AND HIS BATTLE ACES, swooped in to save ARGOSY, as they had done previously with ADVENTURE and BLACK MASK. Popular boss Harry Steeger apparently thought ARGOSY had been moving in the right direction, however ineptly, but he reverted the venerable title to a pulp for several months before a major revamp in late 1943 for the bedsheet relaunch. You could see the difference immediately.

Fiction still predominated but non-fiction took a gradually increasing share if space, and the fiction itself became more mainstream. The objective still seemed to be TRUE plus fiction -- the fiction, presumably, making ARGOSY "The Complete Man's Magazine."

By the 1950s non-fiction predominated, though you still got several short stories and one novelette per issue. ARGOSY's star writer in this period was Erle Stanley Gardner, a prolific contributor in the pulp days. Gardner saved Perry Mason for the slicks but gave ARGOSY the next best thing: the "Court of Last Resort," in which the great man, once a defense attorney in real life, took on real-life cases where defendants appeared to have been railroaded or victimized by incompetent defense and/or prosecution. Beyond Gardner, ARGOSY touched many of the same men's-service bases that TRUE did, while publishing fiction by big names of the time or, in the case of young Elmore Leonard, big names of the future.