The Argosy, 1893

This page is not a pulp cover but a table of contents from The Argosy, Vol. 56 — and that distinction matters historically. Frank Munsey's The Argosy (founded 1882) is the direct ancestor of the pulp magazine. By 1896 Munsey would reformat it entirely on cheap wood-pulp paper, birthing the pulp format proper; this 1893 volume still resembles a genteel fiction monthly, its contents listing serialized chapters of Mr. Warrenne: Medical Practitioner alongside short fiction and travel pieces. No painted cover, no lurid typography — yet the appetite for cheap, varied, genre-spanning popular fiction it fed is exactly what the true pulps, and later the comic book, would inherit and amplify.