The Argosy, Vol. 50

This issue of The Argosy carries no painted cover illustration — only clean letterpress typography announcing its contents, among them Mrs. Henry Wood's serialized novel The House of Halliwell. Founded by Frank Munsey in 1882 and converted to an all-fiction format in 1889, The Argosy is widely considered the first modern pulp magazine, printed on cheap wood-pulp stock to keep the price within working-class reach. Where later pulps would compete through lurid painted covers, The Argosy of 1890 still wore the sober dress of a literary miscellany. It nonetheless established the commercial machinery — serialized genre fiction, mass distribution, low cover price — that the painted-cover pulps of the 1920s and, ultimately, the comic book would inherit wholesale.