The Argosy, Vol. 42

This issue of The Argosy carries no illustrated cover in the lurid painted tradition that would later define the pulps — it opens instead directly to typeset text, the masthead set in stately Roman capitals, the lead story Millicent's Folly attributed to the author of East Lynne (Ellen Wood). Frank Munsey's Argosy was not yet the genre machine it would become; in 1886 it still resembled a family literary miscellany printed on cheap wood-pulp stock. That economy of paper was the seed of everything: by 1896 Munsey had repositioned it as an all-fiction weekly, and the pulp magazine — with its painted covers, breakneck adventure, and genre categories that comic books would inherit wholesale — was born from exactly this unassuming page.