The Argosy, Vol. 50

This issue of The Argosy carries no illustrated cover in the modern sense — it presents as a text-forward literary magazine, its title set in stately serif capitals above a dateline and the opening of Mrs. Henry Wood's serial The House of Halliwell, Chapter XVII. Frank Munsey had relaunched The Argosy in 1882 as an all-fiction weekly printed on cheap wood-pulp paper, and by 1890 it was building the all-fiction magazine format that would define the pulp era. No lurid painting yet — that visual language was still forming. What this page documents is the seedbed: affordable fiction, serial adventure, and the manufacturing model that would, within a decade, produce the painted cover, the genre magazine, and ultimately the comic book.