The Argosy, Vol. 82 No. 4

A woman in a coral dress and wide-brimmed hat crouches over a dark opening in mossy rock—hiding something, or retrieving it—while a uniformed man looms behind her beneath an impressionistic canopy of blue and amber trees. The scene illustrates A Secret of the Bronx, a complete novel by Seward W. Hopkins, priced at ten cents. The Argosy, founded by Frank Munsey in 1882 and printed on cheap wood-pulp paper, was the first all-fiction magazine in America. Its painted covers and serialized adventure stories created the commercial template that later pulps—and eventually comic books—would follow: genre fiction sold fast, cheap, and vivid, one lurid cover at a time.