Desmond's Model by Mary E. Penn

This is a text page, not an illustrated pulp cover — it opens Mary E. Penn's short story Desmond's Model with a dense Victorian prose scene: two Englishmen in tweed suits toiling up a zigzag road into the Tuscan hills above Lucca on a sweltering June afternoon. The Argosy, founded by publisher Frank Leslie in 1882 as an all-fiction weekly, is widely cited as the first American pulp magazine, its cheap wood-pulp paper and broad genre mix — adventure, romance, serialized fiction — establishing the commercial template that later titles such as All-Story and Weird Tales refined into the recognizable pulp format the early comic book industry directly inherited.