The Argosy, Vol. 43

This issue of The Argosy predates the lurid painted covers that would define pulp magazines; its plain letterpress title page announces serialized fiction — here, Mrs. Henry Wood's Lady Grace — in the sober dress of a Victorian family literary monthly. Frank Munsey had not yet converted The Argosy to cheap wood-pulp stock and mass-market adventure fiction; that transformation came in 1882–1896, when it shed genteel respectability and became the first true pulp magazine. The wood-pulp format that followed — cheap paper, penny-a-word action stories, eventually lurid cover paintings — directly seeded the genres comics inherited: science fiction, hardboiled crime, sword-and-sorcery, and weird horror. This transitional volume sits at the quiet origin point of all of it.