#scifi pulp

Howard V. Brown, Dec 1937

Archive.org is so much, much more than just the Wayback Machine. For posterity, they have completely digitized a tremendous amount of scifi and horror and adventure pulps, all available for reading and downloading in PDF, including the following:

Adventure. Of the big two pulps, they have the entire golden age of possibly the greatest pulp mag of all time, Adventure, from 1914-1930, when they had Talbot Mundy's mystic adventures in Central Asia and India, and Harold Lamb's tales of the Mongols and Cossacks. It's incredible to just flip through them and find things like articles where people talk about what it's like to be bitten by a snake, or a firsthand account of the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, or polar exploration from the air. The stories are just the beginning, and in reprints, they don't include the fact they have wonderful maps of where the story is set.

Argosy is also available, the very first pulp magazine ever made starting in 1896. So you can read, among others, the first stories of Zorro, Tarzan, and fantasy novelist A. Merritt, as well as find letters pages where you see the weird prose H.P. Lovecraft, who the other letters that wrote in response did nothing but make fun of him. It's like witnessing cyberbulling in 1914 mixed with crank youtube comments.

Weird Tales. Speaking of Lovecraft, they also have almost the entirety of Weird Tales. Unlike Adventure and Argosy, which sold in the millions, this one was a low seller, but through Robert E. Howard (creator of Conan) and the incredible worlds of Clark Ashton Smith (the true genius of Weird Tales), and the space adventures of C.L. Moore.

The first ever scifi pulp magazine, Amazing Stories, is available for reading. It created geek culture as we know it as he encouraged fans to message each other. So geek culture as we know it started in 1928 so a Luxembourg American weirdo could sell radio parts.

Don't sleep on a few of the minor ones. My favorite is Unknown, which has amazing work by L. Ron Hubbard, one of the best early fantasy and horror novelists. There's also A. Merritt's Fantasy, a reminder of a time he was THE name in Fantasy.