All-Story Weekly, April 28, 1917

A woman in a rose-printed kimono and lace cap leans over a steaming kettle, holding an envelope in the rising vapor — she is opening someone else's mail, the oldest of domestic espionage. The painted cover announces Mystery of the Poison Pen by Isabel Ostrander and E. K. Means's novel The Squeeze Wheel, cover-lines set in bold yellow serif type against a warm ochre ground. All-Story Weekly was a flagship Frank Munsey title printed on cheap wood-pulp stock, selling fiction by the yard for a dime. Its pages had already introduced Tarzan (1912) and would help codify the mystery, adventure, and crime genres whose plots, characters, and visual shorthand the comic book would absorb wholesale within two decades.