The Argosy, Vol. 36

No lurid painting here — this is the pre-pulp original. The Argosy in 1883 was a letterpress literary magazine published by Frank Munsey, its pages dense with serialized fiction. This December issue opens Chapter XXXIV of Joyce Darrell's Winifred Power, its text set in the restrained Victorian manner: chapter headings in small caps, a double-rule ornament, no illustration at all. Munsey would relaunch The Argosy in 1882–88 as a fiction weekly, then in 1896 go fully wood-pulp and all-fiction — that 1896 pivot is the founding moment of the American pulp magazine, the direct ancestor of the dime-novel adventure, the weird-fiction title, and ultimately the comic book.