The Argosy, Vol. 49 (1890): Table of Contents

This page is not a pulp cover but the contents leaf of The Argosy, the American story-paper Frank Munsey reformatted in 1882 and relaunched on cheap wood-pulp stock in 1888—making it the direct ancestor of the pulp magazine. The listing reveals the miscellany that filled early pulps: serialized Victorian fiction (The House of Halliwell by Mrs. Henry Wood, author of East Lynne), travel writing (Fair Normandy by Charles W. Wood), short stories, and verse. No lurid painted cover survives here, only clean letterpress type—yet this taxonomy of genres, packaged affordably for mass readers, is precisely the editorial formula that later pulps would inherit, amplify, and eventually hand off to the comic book.