The Argosy, Vol. 50

This issue of The Argosy carries no lurid painted cover — it presents instead the austere typography of a literary magazine in transition. Founded by Frank Munsey in 1882 and reformatted as an all-fiction weekly by 1889, The Argosy is the direct ancestor of the pulp magazine. Printed on cheap wood-pulp paper and priced for working-class readers, it pioneered the model of serialized genre fiction sold by volume. This December 1890 number opens with Mrs. Henry Wood's The House of Halliwell, a domestic serial — yet Munsey's formula of continuous, affordable fiction would soon make room for adventure, romance, and fantasy, laying the commercial and editorial foundation every subsequent pulp, and later every comic book, built upon.