The Argosy, Vol. 57

This is not a cover image but an interior chapter-opening page from The Argosy, April 1894 — and that distinction matters. Frank Munsey's Argosy (founded 1882, converted to all-fiction on cheap wood-pulp stock in 1882–88) is the founding document of the pulp magazine form. This page opens Chapter XIII of T. W. Speight's The Grey Monk, a serial adventure set against genteel English poverty. The typography is restrained Victorian letterpress — no lurid painted cover here — yet The Argosy pioneered the business model that would produce those covers: cheap paper, cheap price, high-volume fiction. Every genre the comic book later inherited — crime, adventure, weird fiction — traces its commercial DNA directly to Munsey's gamble on pulp.