This page opening — not a painted cover but a letterpress title page — introduces Chapter XXXIX of Lady Valeria by A. Moberly, serialized in The Argosy for November 1886. Frank Leslie's Argosy, founded in 1882 and relaunched by Frank Munsey in 1888 as an all-fiction weekly printed on cheap wood-pulp stock, is widely credited as the first true pulp magazine. At this transitional moment it still ran respectable serial fiction in a respectable typeface. Within a decade Munsey would flood newsstands with adventure, romance, and frontier tales at ten cents, training a mass readership appetite for genre fiction — the engine that would eventually drive the comic book revolution of the late 1930s.
About this artifact
- Date
- November 1886
- Rights
- Public domain — free to view, share, and reuse.
- Restoration
- Digitally restored and hosted by comicbooks.com.
Part of our mission to preserve and restore the public-domain heritage of the medium.