Argosy All-Story Weekly

A dark-haired woman in a crimson coat recoils in alarm, mouth open, eyes fixed on something beyond the frame — behind her, a biplane tilts through a turbulent sky above rocky terrain. The cover advertises two features: Loring Brent's adventure serial Bringing the Boom to Vingo and Richard Howells Watkins's aviation yarn The Stolen Plane. The signature reads Paul Stahr, the prolific illustrator whose painted covers graced dozens of pulps. Founded in 1882, Argosy was the original wood-pulp fiction magazine, selling complete stories for a dime and building the mass readership that appetite for genre — adventure, crime, weird fiction, science fiction — that comic books would inherit wholesale a decade later.