Argosy All-Story Weekly

What survives here is the cloth-bound spine and back board of a 1922 issue of Argosy All-Story Weekly — the painted cover long lost to reading hands and newsstand weather. Frank Munsey's Argosy, launched in 1882 and fully pulp by 1896, was the original wood-pulp fiction weekly: ten cents bought serialized adventure, romance, and the nascent strands of science fiction and weird fantasy that would mature into full genres. All-Story, its sister title, had published Burroughs's Tarzan and John Carter before the merger. The faded blue buckram here is the institutional memory of that pipeline — from pulp page to bound volume to library shelf to the comic book writers who grew up on exactly these stories.