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From Standard Magazines to Pulps and Big Slicks: A Note on the History of US General andFiction MagazinesAuthor(s): R. D. MullenSource: Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Mar., 1995), pp. 144-156Published by: SF-TH IncStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4240420
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144 SCIENCE-FICTIONSTUDIES, VOLUME 22 (1995)APPENDIXR.D. MullenFrom StandardMagazines o Pulpsand Big Slicks:A Note on the History of US General and FictionMagazinesIn the otherwise excellentScience Fictionin the20th Century(reviewedelsewherein this issue),EdwardJames writes as follows, "The 1890s]boom in periodicals, which the United Statesshared with Britain, continuedfm the US] longafter the decline in Britain, and publishersdeliberatelyaimed their publicationsat a widerpublic than in Britain. Therehad been consider-able indignationat the low literary evel of suchdime novels as the FrankReadeLibrary,buttheresult was the replacementof the dime novel byalmost equally low-grade fiction magazinesaimed at almost the same public-'the pulps.'The averagepulp was a magazinemeasuring10x 7 inches, printedon thick coarse paper; it wasthe developmentof the technique of producingcheappaperfrom wood-pulp,in the 1880s, thatcreated the possibility of mass production ofcheap magazinesas well as the name by whichtheybecame known.Thepulps often had raggeduntrimmedpages and, later in their history,covers printed with cheap lurid coal-tar dyes.Now, yellowing andfragile, they are expensivecollectors' items,butwhenpublished, theywerethe kind of things that respectable readersshunned, or kept hidden. Thepublishers of themore up-marketmiddle-classmagazines (print-ed on better quality, shinierpaper, and henceknownas 'theslicks') cameto see thefast-pacedadventurestory to be found in thepulps (whichincludedsJ)as tainted by their low-gradeasso-ciations, and they stopped printing them"(35).Faced with this tissue of confusion, which istypical of almostall commentaryon thepulps Ihave seen,' I have thought it worthwhile towrite the following note. In order to minimizethespace occupied by a subjectonly peripheralto the study of science fiction, it is set in smalltype.During the 1920s, cultural critics began tospeakof "thepulps"and "thebig slicks." Thetwo terms covered not the full spectrumof USmagazines but only a comparatively smallnumber. In the 1921 N.W. Ayer and Son'sNewspaper Annual and Directory, recordingdata for 1920, the departmenttitled "Maga-zines, Women's Publications, and Mail OrderJournals" i.e., periodicalswith nationalcircula-tion) lists 131 titles as magazines. Since we areconcerned here only withfictionmagazinesandgeneralmagazines(those thatdevote about half
their space to fiction), we can, with someuncertainty, cut the list to the 36 tides in thetable on the facing page. Of these five count as"big slicks" (i.e., magazines big in both formatand circulation), four as failing efforts toachieve big-slick success, four as quality maga-zines, and 23 as "pulps."The 36th, TrueStory,can be described as a downscale slick-paperfiction magazine.To speak of "the slicks" rather than of "thebig slicks," as present-dayhistoriansof sf areprone to do, makes no sense, for aside from afew reviews on book paper (the bettergrades ofuncoated stock), a few upscale luxurious-lifemagazineson glossy paper (thebettergradesofcoated stock), and a Sunday supplement onnewsprint, the 95 infinitely various magazineswe have eliminated rom our list were all print-ed on slick paper (the cheaper grades of coatedstock), so that there is no meaningfulreferentfor "slick-papermagazine."The two terms came into usage as pejorativeterms in response to changes occurring in themagazine field between 1912 and 1920, aperiod that can be called "the decline of thestandardmagazine."1. The General Magazines 1892-1911. Printedproducts may be said to be of two broad class-es: thosedesigned to be read anddiscardedandthose designed to be read and preserved.In the19thcenturythe read-and-discard lass consist-ed primarilyof newspapers or local circulationand story papers or dime-novel series for na-tionaldistribution,while the read-and-preserveclass consisted of books and magazines. Thosemost likely to be preserved may be regardedasluxury products requiring he use of expensivegrades of paperandexpensive processes for thereproduction of photographs. Periodicals innewspaper format cannot be individuallyshelved and in bound volumes cannot be easilyhandled, so thatmagazinesto be preservedcanhardly be larger than 8xl 1 and most conve-nientlyshouldbe 7x10 or smaller. On the otherhand, the larger sizes are more inexpensivelyprinted,so thatthe firstpopularmagazineswerein the 8x 1 format.In 1882 the standardprice for magazines (aterm ordinarily applied only to periodicals ofthe read-and-preserve ype) was and for a longtime had been $4.00 a year, 35? a copy. The
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FROM STANDARD MAGAZINES TO PULPS AND BIG SLICKS 145Principal General Magazines and Fiction Magazines in 1912, 1920, and 1925Size: Standard, versize,Undersize.Paper:Book,Slick, Qualitymixture,Mixture f pulpandbetter rades.Frequency:Monthly,Semimonthly,Weekly. Pricepercopy.CIRCulationn thousands.11912 1920 I1925____ ___S P F Pr CIR S P F Pr CIRC IS P F Pr CIRCHarper's S Q M .35 110 S Q M .35 86 IS B M .50 31Century IS Q M .35 150 S Q M .35 47 S B M .50 69Scribner's IS Q M .25 175 S Q M .25 98 S B M .35 71Overland S Q M .15 68 S Q M .25 65Munsey's IS Q M .10 400 S P M .25 132 S P M .25 71Cosmopolitan S Q M .15 750 I S M .25 1330 0 S M .25 1424McClure's IS Q M .15 400 0 S M .15 440 S S M .25American IS Q M .15 300 O S M .25 1441 O S M .25 2113Everybody's IS Q M .15 600 O S M .25 298 S S M .25 383Metropolitan IS Q M .15 291 10 S M .25 368 IHearst's IS 0 M .15 100 lO S M .35 482Smith's S M M .15 129 S P M .20 S&SRailroadMan's IS P M .15 150Green Book lS M M .15 lLippincott's IS B M .25 60 IBlack Cat U B M .15 IS P M .20 5010 StoryBook U B M .10 89 |Smart Set IS B M .25 85 S P M .35 50 0 S M .25 262Ainslee's IS B M .15 227 S P M .20 S&S IS P M .25 S&SRedBook S S M .15 300 0 S M .25 791 S S M .25 781Young's S B M .15 109 S P M .20 102 S P M .20 NGSnappy Stories, 1912 S P M .20 175 S P S .20 NGLive Stories, 1913 S P M .15 130 S P Q .20 NGParisienne, 1915 IS P M .20 140Breezy Stories, 1915 IS P M .20 103 S P S .20 NGSaucy Stories, 1916 IS P M .20 120Telling Tales, 1919 jS P M .20Argosy, 1882 IS P M .15 300 IS P W .10 498 IS P W .10 MCPopular, 1903 IS P S .15 370 IS P S .20 S&S IS P S .25 S&SBlueBook, 1905 IS P M .15 175 IS P M .20 200 S P M .25 189All-Story, 1905 IS P M .15 180People's, 1906 IS P M .15 180 IS P M .20 S&SCavalier, 1908 IS P W .10 125 I ITop-Notch, 1910 IS P S .10 IS P S .15 S&S IS P S .15 S&SAdventure, 1910 IS P M .15 100 IS P S .20 190 IS P T .25 126ShortStories, 1910 IS P M .15 120 S P M .20 132 IS P S .25 291Gunter's/New St j S P M .15 150 l lDetective Story, 1915 IS P W .15 S&S IS P W .15 S&SWesternStory, 1919 IS P W .15 S&S IS P W .15 S&SLove Story, 1921, replacingSmith's IS P W .15 S&SFlynn's Detective Fiction, 1924 IS P W .10 MCComplete Stories, 1924, replacingPeople's IS P S .15 S&SSeaStories,1922 IS P M .20 S&SSportStory,1922 IS P S .15 S&SBlackMask, 1920;ActionStories,1921 IS P M .20 NGAce-High, 1921 _ S P S .20 NGAtlantic IS B M .35 30 TS B M .35 108 IS B M .50 119Sat Eve Post 10 S W .051885 10 S W .05 2109 10 S W .05 2420Collier's 10 S W .10 500 10 S W .05 1043 10 S W .05 1032True Story, 1919 1 10 S M .25 10 S M .25 1193TheStreetandSmithCombination 773 I 1,114TheMunseyCombinationCirculationor 1926) I 444The News StandGroup j About600
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146 SCIENCE-FICTIONSTUDIES, VOLUME 22 (1995)cover of the October 1882 issue of Frank Les-lie's PopularMonthly proclaimsthat it is "TheCheapest Magazine Published in the World /128 pages, Over 100 Engravings / Price 25Cents." Its dimensions are 8x11.In 1887 the dominant American generalmagazineswere The Century llustratedMonthlyMagazineandHarper's New MonthlyMagazine.Both were in the standardformat (the formatthey had made standard),7" by 10" with adver-tising confined to fore and aft sections thatcould be discardedwhen the issues of a volumewere bound together. Each was priced at 35(,each had about 175,000 subscribers, and ineach the magazine proper consisted of about160 pages of alternatingglossy-paper sectionswith half-tone reproductions and book-papersections with line drawings. The advertisingsections ran to about 100 pages in each issue.The third well-known 35C magazineat the timewas The Atlantic Monthly, but it was a moreserious magazine, with no illustrations, andwithonly about 16,000 subscribers.In thisyearScribner's Magazine was establishedas a 25Cgeneral magazine in the standard format tocompete with The Centuryand Harper's as amagazine for people of qualityrather hanwithLeslie's as a popularmagazine.TheSaturdayEveningPost at this time was a5? 12x16 weekly story paperwith a circulationof about25,000. Collier'sWeekly 12x17, 10C),while it published some fiction, was devotedprimarilyto news and public affairs.The success of Scribner's ed other publishersto experimentwith standardmagazinesatpriceslower than 35C. The magic formula proved tobe 128 or 144 pages for 10C, with the pricelater rising to 15C. In 1912 we have the 11general magazines listed in the first tier of thetable:three "quality"magazineson the basis ofprice and eight "popular."They all look verymuch alike. In all of them the magazine properconsists of alternatingsections of glossy paperillustratedwith halftones and book paper illus-tratedwithdrawings.The sameauthorscontrib-ute to all 11; the fiction is mostly of the best-seller type, though it includes some works thathave survived as literature. The merchandiseadvertised in the slick-paper sections (whichsometimes run to more pages thanthemagazineproper) is again virtuallythe same in all 11.In the 1920s, which is as far back as mymemory goes, almost every middle-class homehad as a mark of status one or more four- orfive-tier sectional bookcases, each section witha glass door. The sections for such bookcaseswere advertised n magazinesof the turn of thecentury at $1.00 without or $1.75 with door.The selling point was that a family could addsections to its bookcases at the same time as itadded books to its library.The 10? magazines,including those printedon pulpwoodpaper, of-fered bound volumes at a dollar each. Even
when notbound n volumes, standardmagazinessat nicely on a shelf. All the new magazineswere designed to be of the readandpreserved.2. The Book-Paper Fiction Magazines (1900-1912). Since 1887 Lippincott's, a25C "quality"magazine of 160 book-paperpages, had pub-lished a complete novel in each issue togetherwith verse, several short stories, and an essayor two. Short Stories in 1903 was a nicely il-lustrated25Cmagazinedevotedentirelyto shortstories. The Black Cat, which earlier had of-fered five stories for 5c, sold for IOC n 1912.10 StoryBook, establishedin 1901, asked IOCfor its 10 stories; it was a bit racierin its prosethanTheBlack Cat and in both prose and illus-trations than Short Stories. Gunter'sMagazinein 1907 had several glossy-papersections, waspriced at 15C, and carrieda good deal of bookadvertising. There were othernon-pulp fictionmagazines in the early yearsof thiscentury, butexcept for those mentioned here and below,none that lasted more than a year or two.The Smart Set began in 1900 as a 250, 160-page, book-papermagazineclaimingto publishsophisticated, up-to-date fiction by and aboutthe membersof high society. Thoughit actuallyfound few authorsin high society, it generallylived up to its sub-tide, "AMagazine of Clever-ness." In 1902 Ainslee's Magazine, which hadbegun as a general magazine, was made into aclose imitationof The Smart Set, even unto itssubtide, "AMagazineof CleverFiction,"butatthe lower price of 15C. (The subtide laterbecame"TheMagazineThatEntertains.")Bothpublishedpoetry, essays, playlets, and reviewsas well as "completenovels" and shortstories.Neither was illustrated.The Red Book Maga-zine, established in 1903 as a 10Cshort-storymagazine, differed in that its fiction was pro-fusely illustratedand in that each issue hadabout 48 pages of photographsof fashion mod-els, actresses, and stage scenes. All three pub-lished one or two "sex-problem" tories in eachissue, butAinslee s and The Red Booktendedtobe less daring and less sophisticatedthan TheSmartSet, and where TheSmartSethad a stan-dardtwo-color coverdepictinga devil as puppe-teer with a pair of lovers as marionettes, thefull-color covers on the other two featuredwomen in high-fashionclothing. Advertising nThe Red Book ran to 48 pages or so in eachissue, to somewhat fewer in Ainslee's, and stillfewer in The Smart Set.In 1912 WilliamC. Clayton,latera publisherof action-adventurepulp magazines, left TheSmart Set, whose tide appearedon its coverwithlargeswirling S's, takingwithhimperhapssome manuscripts,certainlya list of authors,toestablish Snappy Stories, which tide also ap-peared with large swirling S's. (Its subtitle,echoing Ainslee's, was "A Magazineof Enter-tainingFiction.") It publishedpoetry, playlets,
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FROM STANDARD MAGAZINES TO PULPS AND BIG SLICKS 147
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148 SCIENCE-FICTIONSTUDIES, VOLUME 22 (1995)
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FROM STANDARD MAGAZINES TO PULPS AND BIG SLICKS 149and reviews as well as fiction in its 128 book-paper pages; its price was 15eC, high price forquantity-minded eaders. It was a success fromthe start.A sex-problem story is, a story about suchproblems as are created by infidelity or pre-marital sex, often a satirical story in which,e.g., a wife repaysher faithless husband n kindor a chorus girl retains her virginity whilefleecing a millionaire, or a sentimentalstory inwhich a girl or woman is forgiven her sin onthe grounds that it was committed under ex-traordinary ircumstances. Young'sMagazine,founded in 1897 as a kind of scandal sheet,became a standard book-paper magazine in1908 and was perhaps the first such magazinedevoted largely to sex-problemstories.3. The Largest Magazines in the World,1896-1914. In 1894 The Argosy, published byFrankA. Munsey, was a story paper (16 10x13pages) for young people; in 1895 it was madeinto a 128-page illustratedgeneral magazine inthe standard format, a sort of Munsey's foryoung people. Thatexperimenthavingmet withlittle success, TheArgosy was changed in 1896to a 192-page pulp-paper iction magazine pub-lishing mainly stories for boys. It was still nota great success, butthe boys' stories were grad-ually abandoned in favor of stories with heroesand heroines in their20s or older rather hanintheirteens, and by 1905 it was, among Ameri-can magazines, second in circulation only toMunsey's. It was "TheLargest Magazine in theWorld"-192 pages of fiction(with some verse)for lOC. It is not evident thatanyone thoughtitunworthybecause of the pulpwood paperusedfor the magazine proper. More important orthe gist of this note, it was a middle-classmagazine, with, in the November 1905 issue,48 slick-paper advertising pages for merchan-dise of the same kinds as that advertisedin thegeneral magazines.The Popular Magazine was established in1903 as, according to Moskowitz (309-10), a96-page boys' magazine, but in 1904 it wasmade into an all-fiction magazine similarto TheArgosy and claiming the title of the world'slargest magazine by printingon its cover "194Pages Choice Fiction." In the November 1904issue the magazine proper has 192 pulp-paperpages in 16-page sections and 2 slick-paperpages; that is, the first leaf of the rear slick-papersection is used for text ratherthanadver-tising. Since the word "magazine" aid claim torespectability, hatwordappearson the cover intype the same size as "Popular."The Munsey Company added The All-StoryMagazine to its list in 1905. It was edited byRobertH. (Bob) Davis, who would also launchThe Cavalier in 1908. They differed from TheArgosy only to the extent that Davis's editorialjudgments differed from those of Matthew
White, editor of the always more successfulArgosy. Davis's magazines are of special inter-est to sf fans in that they publishedmore sf thanthe other magazines.The Blue Book Magazine was establishedin1905, People's Magazine in 1906. The formerpublishedglossy-paper pages devoted to stagephotos (withsometimesa full-colorfrontispiece)and pulp-paperpages devoted to fiction and aplay-review department, "Stageland." Thelatter, according to Moskowitz, had the sameformat in 1908 (321).In 1907 7he Popular and The Blue Bookraised theirprice to 15?;.People's followed in1908, TheArgosyand TheAU-Storyn 1912. In1907 The Popular and The Blue Book also in-creased their page-count to 224, setting off anewcompetition orthelargest-magazine-in-the-world tide. When TheArgosyand TheAll-Storywent to 15? they also went to 240 pages, whichwas promptly matched by TheBlue Book. Thepage-count n TheArgosyand TheAU-Storywaseventually reduced. In 1916 The Blue Book isalone at240 pulp-paperpages, the stage depart-mentshaving beendropped.From 1912 through1918, ThePopular led the field in circulation;it had become a semimonthlyin 1910.These are all middle-class magazines. Thecovers, withfew exceptions, arequite sedate, inmanycases simply depictingaprettygirl. Whenaction or activity is illustrated, t tends to be asocial scene or an outdoor scene depictingman-ly activity not involvingviolentconflict, such asdrivinga dog-sled across a snow-covered land-scape. Scenes depicting or suggesting violentaction did begin to appearin 1912. In Volume21 of The Cavalier(Oct 21-Nov 2, 1912) read-ers arguevehementlyabout a recentchange inthemagazine's cover, whichnow, to the embar-rassmentof some of them, illustratesa story.Since I have no 1912 issues of the magazineother thancoverless ones in the bound volumespecified, I cannotjudge the extent to whichviolence is depicted. The cover of the Febrary15, 1913, issue depicts not violence itself but aresultof violence: a gentleman n evening dressand a uniformed policeman have opened thedoor to the passenger compartment f a limou-sine and found a boundandgagged man whomthey will presumably rescue. Several Argosyand Blue Book covers in 1912 and laterdepicta personstartledor frightenedby someting notshown-that is, we seem to have the ancienttheatricalpolicy of keeping the violence off-stage. Be that as it may, none of the magazinesof these years in my collection has a coveranywhere near as violent as those that weretypical of many pulp magazines in the 1920sand '30s.In March 1910 Street and Smithreplacedits'ipTopWeekly,aSCdime-novelseries devotedto the adventuresof Frankand Dick Merriwell,with Top-NotchMagazine, priced at 10', with
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150 SCIENCE-FICTIONSTUDIES, VOLUME22 (1995)the slogan "TopsEverythingfor Boys," editedby BurtL. Standish,the authorof the Merriwellstories, and, though called a magazine, retain-ing the 8xl 1 dime-novel format until Novem-ber, when it was turned over to a new editorand made into a standard192-page magazine(Moskowitz 353-54). The October 1913 issuemakes no reference to boys and in generalappearancedoes not differ from the otherpulp-papermagazines. It was still priced at 10C.The publishers of Everybody's launchedAdventure n 1910 as a 15Cmonthlymagazineof 192 pages. It graduallyadopteda policy thatdefined "adventurestories" for the pulp-papermagazines:stories set in a romanticor fantasticpast, in the Americanwest, or, with white menas heroes, in Africa, Asia, or the SouthSeas. Itbecame a semimonthly in 1917. Short Storieswas takenover by Doubleday-Pagein 1910 andchanged to pulp paper. The 160-page issuedated June 1912 contains a complete novelreprinted from a 1906 book and nine shortstories, all presumably original. At some pointin the next few years, it modeled itself onAdventure n content and typography.Gunter's Magazine was at some point be-tween 1907 and 1910 taken over by Street andSmith.The April 1910 issue has 192 pulp-paperpages, plus four slick-paperpages for the tableof contentsand promotionalmaterial:
"You have probably noticed that we haveeliminated the illustrations rom the pages ofGunter's, retaining only the pictorial head-ings. This is in line with our with our policythat 'the story's the thing.' We want to crowdinto our 192 pages just as muchfiction as wepossibly can.... So much for quantity.As toquality-that is synonymous with Gunter's."According toMoskowitz, Gunter'swasreplacedby New Story Magazine in November 1910(349). The June 1912 New Story has the sameformat as the April 1910 Gunter's.At the end of 1914 we have only ten pulp-paperfictionmagazines. In all thesemagazines,except for ShortStoriesandAdventure,thefirstsection is on slickpaper. TheArgosyconsistent-ly carrieda considerableamountof advertising,TheAll-Storyand The Cavalier somewhatless.TheBlueBook, though ithead-lined ts advertis-ing pages with "The Great Show Window ofAmerica," was less successful in this respectthan TheArgosy. The publishers of ShortSto-ries andAdventureapparentlymade no effortinthese years to promote their magazines asadvertising media; the same may be said forStreetand Smith with respectto People's, Top-Notch, and New Story, but they did profit fromadvertising n ThePopular, whose September7,1914, issue has in its advertisingpages a featurecalled "The Up-to-Date Man," apparentlyaneffort to attract men's-wear advertising. Itshould also be noted that some of the advertis-
ing in the Munsey magazines and in The BlueBook and ThePopularwas for big-ticketitemssuch as phonographsand automobiles.The raggededges disdainedby EdwardJameswere not peculiar to the pulp-papermagazines.In the October 1900 issue of Munsey's, FrankA. Munseyboasts of having three years beforeinstalled machinerythat cut the leaves of hismagazines;those who read other magazinesin1900 had to slit the folds with a paperknife-ortake their copies to a printer for trimming.Otherpublisherssooner or later installed suchmachinery, so that the ragged edges producedby slittingwheels rather hantrimmededges arestandard in standard magazines until about1920. The few trimmedcopies fromtheseyearsin my collection were all taken by individualreaders to a print shop for ttimming, as isevident from the way the type and illustrationon the covers crowd the top, bottom, and rightedges in comparisonto the left edge.Although TheArgosy and The Popular hadtheirorigins as juveniles, it was as "thelargestmagazines n theworld"thattheyachieved theirsuccess. The first magazine to issue directlyfrom a dime-novel series was Top-Notch in1910. Gunter's and ShortStories as pulps hadas their initial readers those who had read theearlier book-paperversions of the same title.The Blue Book, The All-Story, People's, TheCavalier, and Adventurewere established asnew magazines. As for the quality of the fic-tion, it was far frombeing "equally ow-grade"as the dime novels (whichcontinuedto be pub-lished) but was instead largely written by thesame writersas contributedictionto the qualityandpopulargeneralmagazines. Oneexample isH. Rider Haggard, who appeared in Harper'sand Munsey's as well as The Blue Book andother pulp-paper magazines. Another is oneCyrusTownsendBrady,whose novelsappear nissues I happen to have of TheCentury,Lippin-cott's, and The All-Story. A third is H.G.Wells, whose Love and Mr Lewishamwas re-printed by and whose Tono-Bungay had itsinitial US publicationin The Popular. It mayalso be addedthatall thesemagazinespublishedpoetry, most often short poems as page-endfillers but sometimes longer poems as featuresin their own right.4. Three Magazines for Special Audiences.Smith'sMagazinewas establishedby StreetandSmithin 1905 with Theodore Dreiseras editor.The first 12 issues contain sections of slickpaper, glossy paper, and pulp paper. Since Ihave examined only the bound volumes, Icannot speak of the advertising sections. Theslick and glossy pages in the magazineproperare elaborately llustratedwithphotographsanddrawings, some in color. The fiction on thepulp-paperpages consistsmostlyof story-paperlove stories such as appeared n TheNew York
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FROM STANDARD MAGAZINESTO PULPS AND BIG SLICKS 151Weekly, the Street and Smith story paper.Among the departments is one called "TheLatest Fashions for Limited Incomes (Illus-trated)."In sum, Smith's seems to be aimed atthe lower middle class rather hat at the readersof the other general magazines.Inasmuchas in 1906 railroad workers werevery numerous and perhaps the highest paid ofall industrialworkers, they formed an obviousaudience for a specialized magazine. I have notseen a copy of The Railroad Man's Magazine;according to Moskowitzit was a "192-pageten-cent pulp, just as heavy on the fiction as on thefact, [and] copiously illustrated"(323), whichwould seem to indicate that it did not use slickpaper for its illustratedarticles.Actors were relatively more numerous in1911 than now, what with stock companiesscattered across the land in large towns andsmall. The June 1914 issue of The GreenBook,established in 1911 by the publishers of TheRedBookand TheBlueBook, s devotedn itsarticles and fiction entirely to the stage: 96pages of articlesillustratedwithphotographsonslick paper and 96 illustratedwith drawingsonpulp paper. The August 1917 issue is all pulpthough illustratedwith poorly reproducedhalf-tones as well as drawings, andis almost entirelydevoted to fiction. On the theater we now findonly five pages of photos, one article, and areview department. The Green Book was stillalive in 1920, though perhapsnot for the fullyear. Advertisementsin The Red Book, whichmake no mentionof the theater, indicate that itis now devoted to careers for women, for thearticles advertisedare about women who havebeen successful in business or public affairs.5. The Book-Paper Fiction Magazines 1913-1920. In 1914 The Smart Set was sold to acompany managed by one E.F. Warner, who,by offering each a one-sixth interest in themagazine, recruited two famous critics, H.L.Mencken andGeorgeJean Nathan, to takeoverthe editing (Mott4:260-61). TheSmart Set waslosing money, but Nathanand Mencken felt thatthey could manage money-making magazinessimilar to Snappy Stories just as well as theirliterary nferiors, so they establishedthe first ofwhat they called their "louse magazines," TheParisienne.In 1916they challengedSnappySto-ries directly with Saucy Stories, and in 1920they establishedBlack Mask to publish mysteryand adventurestories. All three proved profit-able for a time, and thus made possible thecontinuation of The Smart Set, which theyedited for the fun of it ratherthanmoney.The first response to the success of SnappyStories had come from Street and Smith, thepublisher of Ainske's, who launched WomenStories in 1913, changing the tide after a fewissues to Live Stories. Its January 1916 issuehas 160 book-paperpages and is pricedat 15C.
The publicationof its March 1916 issue resultedin the arrest of its nominal publisher, oneGeorge C. Dodge, on the chargeof publishingindecent literature.Dodge was discharged bythe court afterstatingthathe "haddestroyedallexisting copies of themagazineandhad discon-tinued its publication" (Publisher's Weekly,89:1268, Apr 15, 1916). The magazine wasthen sold to Clayton's company and made acompanionto SnappyStories.The Young companyestablishedBreezySto-ries in 1915. WilliamClayton, who disappearsfrom my sources in 1917, having sold hiscompanyandperhaps gone to war, returned n1919 to establishTellingTales. One is temptedto say that the first US genre-magazineswerethose devoted to the sex-problemstory, but intruth it is cleverness (or attemptsthereat)thatbest characterizesall the magazinesthatsprangup in the wake of Ihe SmartSet, for they allpublishedmany stories in which sexual misbe-haviorplays no partat all. Moreover, both TheSmart Set and Ainslee's laid claim to literaryexcellence and, in their reviews, to criticalacumen, a claim surely justified in the Men-cken-Nathanssuesof TheSmartSet. JohnHeldJr got his start in The Parisienne; DorothyParkerreviewed plays in Ainslee's.By 1917 the war in Europe had made bookpaper scarce and expensive, so that all thesemagazines, The Red Book excepted, went topulp paper.The 15Cmagazineswentto 20CandThe SmartSet, calling itself "TheAristocratofMagazines," to 35C, which kept it, by pricedefinition, among the quality magazines eventhough it now used pulp paper.6. The Pulp-PaperMagazines 1915-1920. Thesuccessful conversionby Streetand Smithof theTip-TopWeeklyo Top-NotchMagazine n 1910led in 1915 to their conversion of the NickCarterWeekly o Detective Story Magazineandin 1919 to that of the Buffalo Bill WeeklytoWesternStoryMagazine. But Nick Carter andBuffalo Bill were soon replacedby such detec-tives and ranchersandcowboys as had in recentyears become common in fiction and generalmagazines as well as in books. Both magazinesdeveloped as 15Cweeklies of 144 pages.The competitionto providethe largestmaga-zine in the world could not survive the risingcosts of the war years. The pulp magazinesdiscussed above had either to reduce pages orraiseprices. Most of themdid both, so that20Cand 192 pages became standard or the old-linepulp-papermagazinesotherthan hosepublishedby Munsey, whose prices returned o IOCandwhose pages were by 1920 down to 160.TheMunseycompanybegantheconsolidationof its magazines in 1912 by "merging" TheScrap Book2 with The Cavalier; that is, bytransferringhe subscribersof the formerto thelatter, which is all magazine mergers usually
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FROM STANDARD MAGAZINES TO PULPS AND BIG SLICKS 153
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154 SCIENCE-FICTIONTUDIES,VOLUME22 (1995)
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FROM STANDARD MAGAZINESTO PULPS AND BIG SLICKS 155publishers, Harry Steegar of PopularPublica-tions (who once boasted of having issued 42titles in a single month[Goodstonev]) andNedPines of the Thrilling Group, as well as bysome lesser firms. The total numberof pulpsonthe stands ncreased fromperhaps40 in 1927 toas many as two hundredby 1937.The Popular declined in the 1920s, thoughjust when the decline began is not clear, itscirculationfigures being hidden within those ofthe Street and Smith Combination,and died in1931. The circulation of Argosy-Allstoryalsodeclined; the figure for the three-magazineMunsey Combination s for 1928 less than thatfor Argosy-Allstoryalone in 1922. The declinecan be attributed to the growing number ofpulp-papermagazines and the bewildermentofreaderschoosing from a host of magazinesthatall looked much the same. For a few monthsin1926-27 Adventureappeared n the format of aqualitymagazine, looking much like the Scrib-ner's of the sameperiod; i.e., with book paper,and, instead of illustrations, nteriordecorationsby Rockwell Kent (one of the most admiredart-ists of the day, noted for, among other things,his edition of Moby Dick), at first with plaincovers and then with cover designs by Kent ofa symbolic nature. This attempt to find newreadersamong thosewho presumablywouldnottouch a pulp magazine did not succeed; pulppaper returned and Kent was replaced by lessprestigiousand less expensive illustrators.Evenso, Adventureprosperedin the 1920s and untilthe saturation of the market in the 1930s, atwhich time it fell into Harry Steeger's handsand was given covers like the fourth on thefacing page.47he Blue Book and Short Stories also pros-pered in the 1920s, and even in the 1930s andlatermanaged to survive independentof the bigchains. Short Stories had a most distinctivecover design, one that featured a large redcirculardisk suggesting a setting or rising sun,with the illustrationsometimes resembling thefirst of the Adventurecovers reproducedhere,butalso, alas, sometimesresemblingthe fourth.The socialdecline of the old-linepulps can beseen in the slick-paper advertising sections,which in 1925 still carried some advertising orautomobiles but thereafteronly for cheap luxu-ries or necessities or for correspondencecours-es. The slick-paper sections that had appearedin Argosy-Allstoryevery week now appearedonly once a monthand about 1931 disappearedaltogether. A page-count claim on a magazinecover, which had earlier includedonly the text,now included the advertising pages.It continued to be truethat most of the contri-butors to the big slicks also published in thepulps. Detective stories remained frequent inthe general magazines as well as fiction maga-zines, and it is simply not true that the bigslicks ceased to publish fast-paced adventure
stories. Writers were said to graduatefrom thepulps to the big slicks, but the big-slick marketwas not large enough, even at the high rates itpaid, to make popular authors as rich as theywanted to be, or to keep them busy, so withfew exceptionstheycontinued to sell also to thepulps.The depression increased the total sales ofpulp-paper magazines, which along with themovies offered an inexpensive form of enter-tainment, but the glutting of the marketdrasti-cally reduced the sale of individual titles. By1936 Popular Publications and the ThrillingGroup had passed Street and Smith in totalcirculation. The Munsey titles were sold toPopularPublications n 1938, bringingthe lifeof the oldArgosyeffectively to an end. Munseyshould have held out a bit longer, for pulp-magazine sales boomed during the war years,when anythingprintedcould be sold. The salesof Popular Publications reached 2,243,000copies per month in the first half of 1946.During the war Streetand Smith, using almostall its paper allotment for publications moreprofitablethan pulps, had droppedmost of itstitles and changed its weekly and semimonthlypulps to monthlies or bimonthlies; in 1946 itpublishedonly four issues per month. In 1948it soldeverythingpulp(back-issuecopyrightsaswell as magazine titles) but Astounding toPopularPublications.But even PopularPublica-tions could not survive the competition nowofferedby paperbackbooks, so thatby 1955 thepulp era had come to a close. And, for thatmatter, so had the era of the big slicks. Thepresent-dayCosmopolitanandRedbookare no-thing like the big slicks of the inter-waryears.8. The General Magazines 1912-1930. The de-cline of Harper's and TheCenturyvis-i-vis thepopularmagazineshad alreadybegun in 1904.In the period 1912-1925 they declinedvis-a-visTheAtlantic,whichhad neverused illustrationsand hence had never flourished by providingentertainment to people of quality. Between1920 and 1925 they both droppedillustrationsand emulatedThe Atlantic in seriousness;Har-per's succeeded, The Century faded away.Scribner's survivedinto the 1930s by featuringmodernist iction, butthenattemptedglossinessin a 9x12 format and died.For some years by 1913, TheSaturdayEve-ning Post and Collier'shad been demonstratingthatadvertiserspreferredpages largerthat7xlOand pages on which advertisementswere min-gled with the text of stories or articles. In 1913TheAmerican, which had been seriously con-cerned with social questions, turnededitoriallyto optimistic human-interest rticles and storiesand typographicallyto the dimensions 9x12,with advertising no longer segregated in dis-cardable sections. McClure's ceased to segre-gate advertisingat about the same time and in
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156 SCIENCE-FICTIONTUDIES,VOLUME 2 (1995)1915 adopted an llx14 page. Cosmopoltan,Everybody's, The Metropolitan, and Hearst'ssoon followed into one or the otherof the largersizes. Two fictionmagazines, People's andTheRed Book, also made the change, the formerunsuccessfullyand so only temporarily,but thelatter with great success. Advertisers nowdemanded lager and larer circulations. By1920 The American, Cosmopolitan, and TheRed Book, leaving the others far behind, hadjoined Collier's and The SaturdayEveningPostin a top five. Hearst's was absorbedby Cosmo-politan. McClure's and Everybody'sattemptedvarious expedients, including a return to the7x10 size; the former faded away, the lattereventually became a pulp-paperfiction maga-zine, a sort of little sister to Adventure, itserstwhile little brother. Munsey's, which aloneamong the general magazines had resisted thetrend, also became a fiction pulp.9. Conclusion. It is of course true that therewere in the 19th century, and are even today,people who shun magazines with covers thatsuggest sex or depict violence and would, ifthey read such magazines, keep them hidden,and who as parents,would seize and trash suchmagazines if they found them in the hands oftheir children. But to assume that this attitudeextendedto all pulp-papermagazinesis absurd.For critics in the 1920s "pulp"had come tomean cheapness in the sense of shoddiness;"slick" had long meantexpertise in fraudulentor wordlless endeavors. Worthwhilefiction, itwas held, appeared not on pulp paper and noton slick paper but on book paperin books or inserious magazines like The Atlantic or theconverted Harper's. But these were criticalterms, unknown to people who did not readreviews and who would have been a bit sur-prised that literary and culturl critics consid-ered wortiless not only such magazines asArgosy-AlistoryWeeklybut also such as TheSaturdayEvening Post, which in the interwarwas virtually the bible of the great Americanmiddle class. Latter-day commentators haveconfused the attitudes of literary people withthose of people in general.And, afterall, what is wrong with pulpwoodpaper? If it had not been invented and devel-oped, we would not have the newspapers weread nor the paperbackbooks we have becomeaccustomed to. Paperbackbooks are the pulpsof today, and some appear with covers thatcause "respectablepeople" to turn away.NOTES1. Sam Moskowitz is the honorable excep-don. I have drawnon his work for informationfor which I have at hand no direct evidence.2. See Moskowitz for an accountof the com-
plicated history of this magazine, which I can-not detail on the basis of the one issue in mycollection, and also for an account of a secondMunseymagazineof which I have no copy, TheOcean, later The Live Wire(321-26).3. The guarantee was met by running thesection in both issues each month of the severlsemi-monthlies n the Group, so that there is inAyer no audited figure for average per-issuecirculation. The Street and Smith and Munseycombinations,on the otherhand, ran the slick-paper advertsing section in only one issue ofeach magazine per month.4. Steegerdid for the pulps in the 1930s whathad been done for general magazines in the1890s by FrankA. Munsey, who had boughtout failing magazinesand 'merged' them withhis own magazines. Some subscribers to Go-dey's may not have been happy to find theirsubscriptions completed with issues of TheArgosy, but then some may have been, for itwas for the sake of possible renewals thatMunsey had bought the subscription ist.WORKS CITED. This note is based primarilyon my own collection of magazines togetherwith data from the Ayer directories, but thefollowingworkshaveprovidedsome informa-tion.Goodstone, Tony, ed. ThePuips:FiptyYearsofAmerican Pop Culure. NY; Chelsea House,1970. An anthology of stories togetherwithcolor reproductions f covers; devoted to themore sensationalaspects of the magazines.Gruber,Frank. ThePulpJungle. Los Angeles:SherbournePress, 1967. Reminiscesof writ-ing for the pulp magazinesin the 1930s.Mott, Frnk Luther. A History of AmericanMagazines.4 vols. Cambridge,MA: HarvardUP, 1930-38.Moskowitz, Sam. Underthe Moons of Mars:AHistory and Anthology of "The ScientificRomance"in the MunseyMagazines, 1912-1920. NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston,1970.N. Y. Ayer and Sons Directory of Newspapersand Periodicals, 1894-1951. Tide varies.Lists for each magazine the frequency ofissue, field of interest,date of founding, pagesize, subscriptionprice, circulation, and, upto 1913, number of pages in the magazineproper.After 1913 text and advertisingwereintermingled n most magazinesand the pagecount varied greatly from issue to issue.Reynolds, Quentin. The Fiction Factory, or,From Pulp Row to Quay Street: The Storyof 1(00 Years of Publishing at Street andSmith. NY: Random House, 1965. Thoughwritten by a prominent journalist and pub-lished by RandomHouse, this is a puff jobratherthan a reliablehistory.
