The Argosy, Vol. 28

This page opening from The Argosy — a London literary monthly founded by Mary Elizabeth Braddon in 1865 — shows no illustrated cover in the modern pulp sense: instead, clean letterpress typography announces the issue date and leads directly into serialized fiction. The excerpt here, Called to the Rescue, Chapter XXV, features Professor Dangerfield, a fashionable medium whose séances pack carriages into the street. The Argosy predates the wood-pulp American magazines of the 1890s that hardened into genre; it belongs to the earlier tradition of the shilling miscellanies — respectable, sensation-tinged, proto-genre — from which Frank Munsey's Argosy (1882, U.S.) drew its very name, carrying the adventure-serial formula toward the lurid painted covers that would eventually beget the comic book.