The Argosy, Vol. XLIX

This is not a pulp magazine cover in the illustrated sense — The Argosy in 1890 was a text-only literary monthly published by Frank Munsey, printed on cheap wood-pulp paper and set in plain typography with no cover illustration. What survives is the opening page of Chapter IX of The House of Halliwell by Mrs. Henry Wood, author of East Lynne. Yet this modest object matters: Munsey's decision to print on inexpensive pulp stock and cut the cover price to a dime transformed magazine publishing. By 1896 The Argosy would go all-fiction, and the pulp formula — cheap paper, cheap price, serialized genre adventure — was born, the direct ancestor of every lurid painted cover that followed.