The Argosy, Vol. 43

This issue of The Argosy predates the lurid painted covers that would define pulp culture — it presents instead the sober, text-heavy typography of a Victorian family fiction magazine, opening here to Chapter V of Lady Grace by Mrs. Henry Wood, author of East Lynne. No cover illustration survives in this scan; the design language is entirely verbal, set in classical serif type on cheap wood-pulp stock. Yet The Argosy, founded by Frank Andrew Munsey, is the direct ancestor of the pulp era: by 1896 Munsey would relaunch it as an all-fiction weekly on that same inexpensive paper, inadvertently inventing the pulp magazine format — the industrial pipeline from which science fiction, hardboiled crime, and weird horror all eventually poured.