The Argosy, Vol. 50

No painted cover here — this is the pre-pulp original: a typeset title page from Frank Munsey's The Argosy, the magazine that invented the format. Where later pulps would sell themselves with lurid painted scenes, this November 1890 number opens with sober Victorian letterpress: the masthead in bold serif caps, the date, and the first lines of Mrs. Henry Wood's serial The House of Halliwell. Munsey had just converted The Argosy to an all-fiction weekly printed on cheap wood-pulp paper, slashing the cover price to a dime. That decision — fiction, pulp stock, low cost — created the pulp magazine as an institution, and every genre the comic book later inherited traces its lineage to this unassuming page.