Argosy All-Story Weekly

Argosy All-Story Weekly holds a singular place in popular literature: launched by Frank Munsey in 1882, it was the first all-fiction pulp magazine, printed on cheap wood-pulp paper and sold for a dime to readers hungry for adventure, romance, and the fantastical. Its painted covers — typically action-frozen scenes of explorers, gunfighters, or imperiled figures rendered in bold oils — trained readers to judge a story by its image before a word was read. The magazine serialized Edgar Rice Burroughs, Zane Grey, and Rafael Sabatini, effectively inventing the templates for science fiction, sword-and-sorcery, and adventure genres that comic books would directly inherit a generation later.