The Argosy, Volume XXIV

This is not a pulp magazine cover in the painted, sensational tradition—it is the title page of The Argosy, a British literary monthly published by Richard Bentley & Son of New Burlington Street, London. Edited by the novelist Mrs. Henry Wood, author of East Lynne, this bound volume collects issues from July to December 1877. The page is typographically spare: a motto in italic ("Laden with Golden Grain"), the masthead in bold Roman capitals, editor credit, volume number in Roman numerals, and the royal warrant noting Bentley as Publisher in Ordinary to Her Majesty. This Victorian periodical is a direct ancestor of Frank Munsey's Argosy (1882), the American all-fiction weekly that would pioneer the wood-pulp format and launch genre fiction as a commercial industry.