The Argosy, Vol. 57

This issue of The Argosy carries no illustrated cover in the modern sense — its February 1894 appearance is typeset and austere, the title rendered in plain letterpress across cheap wood-pulp stock. Frank Munsey had relaunched The Argosy in 1882 as an all-fiction monthly, and by 1894 it was the foundational all-fiction pulp magazine in America, running serialized adventure, romance, and mystery without the lurid painted imagery that would define later pulps. Inside this issue: The Grey Monk, attributed to the author of The Mysteries of Heron Dyke. Munsey's formula — continuous fiction, low price, mass audience — established the commercial and narrative machinery that pulps, and eventually comic books, would run on for the next sixty years.