The Argosy, Vol. 43

No painted cover here — The Argosy in its 1887 incarnation was still a text-only literary magazine, its front page set entirely in letterpress type. This issue opens Chapter III of Lady Grace by Mrs. Henry Wood, author of East Lynne, signaling a respectable fiction miscellany aimed at a broad reading public. Frank Munsey would not relaunch The Argosy as an all-fiction wood-pulp weekly until 1882 and transform it into the true pulp format — cheap paper, no illustrations, pure story — by 1896. That transformation made The Argosy the direct ancestor of the genre pulps: the adventure, horror, and science fiction magazines whose lurid painted covers and breakneck serials handed their DNA directly to the American comic book.