The Argosy, Vol. 57

No painted cover here — The Argosy in its 1894 incarnation wore plain typographic dress: title, date, and a table of contents-style header leading the reader straight to the fiction within. Frank Munsey had relaunched the magazine in 1882 as a children's paper, then in 1894 converted it entirely to fiction for adults, printing on cheap wood-pulp stock — the move that coined the very word pulp. This January issue opens with The Grey Monk, billed as by the author of The Mysteries of Heron Dyke, signaling the melodramatic mystery and sensation fiction that filled Munsey's pages before lurid painted covers became the pulp industry's signature selling tool a decade later.