The Argosy, Vol. 21

This issue of The Argosy — founded by Frank Andrew Chatto in 1865 and relaunched by publisher Frank Munsey in its American incarnation — carries no lurid painted cover; the 1876 British original presented itself as a respectable literary monthly, text-only, its title set in stately roman capitals above a dateline. Serialized here is Mrs. Henry Wood's Edina, chapter by chapter, in the mode of Victorian domestic fiction. Yet The Argosy name matters enormously: when Munsey converted his American version to all-fiction pulp in 1896, printing on cheap wood-pulp paper and selling for a dime, he created the pulp magazine format — the direct ancestor of the adventure, fantasy, and horror titles whose cover paintings and genre formulas the comic book would inherit wholesale.