The Shadow Garden (A Phantasy) and Other Plays

What appears here is not a pulp magazine cover at all, but the plain cloth binding of a 1910 literary volume — The Shadow Garden (A Phantasy) and Other Plays — its deep green buckram boards carrying nothing more than a UC-NRLF library barcode. No painted scene, no cover-lines, no lurid typography. The book predates the pulp boom by a decade and belongs instead to the genteel tradition of closet drama and verse plays published for readers rather than stages. It is exhibited here as a reminder that the pulp magazines of the 1920s–40s drew on precisely this Edwardian vogue for phantasy and the uncanny when they shaped the weird-fiction and sword-and-sorcery genres that comics would later inherit.