The Argosy, Vol. 29

This January 1880 issue of The Argosy presents no illustrated cover — only clean letterpress typography on laid paper, opening directly to fiction. The lead story, "The Mysteries of Heron Dyke" by Joseph Hocking, signals the magazine's diet of sensation fiction, gothic mystery, and serial adventure. Founded by Frank Andrew Munsey in 1882 as a children's weekly, The Argosy was actually a British monthly predating it; this volume belongs to that London lineage. When Munsey reformatted his American Argosy onto cheap wood-pulp stock in 1896, he accidentally invented the pulp magazine — the mass medium that would birth hardboiled crime, science fiction, sword-and-sorcery, and weird horror, handing their DNA entire to the comic book that followed.