The Argosy, Vol. 50

This issue of The Argosy carries no lurid painted cover — just confident Victorian typography on a text page opening Chapter XXIII of Mrs. Henry Wood's The House of Halliwell. Founded by Frank Munsey in 1882 and reformatted in 1888 onto cheap wood-pulp paper, The Argosy is the direct ancestor of every pulp magazine that followed. Before garish cover paintings became the genre's signature, Munsey sold fiction by sheer volume and variety — adventure, romance, serialized novels — at a price working readers could afford. That formula, fiction as commodity delivered on disposable paper, established the commercial logic that later pulps dressed in painted monsters, rocket ships, and shadowed detectives, handing those genres wholesale to the comic book.