The Argosy, Vol. 57

This issue presents no painted cover — only clean letterpress typography on white stock, the house style of The Argosy in its early years. Frank Munsey had relaunched the magazine in 1882 as a fiction weekly for boys, then in 1896 would reprint it on cheap wood-pulp paper and target adults, accidentally naming an entire medium. Here, the page opens directly onto T. W. Speight's serial The Grey Monk, Chapter XVIII. That austerity is historically charged: The Argosy was proving that cheap fiction sold by the tens of thousands on story alone, a commercial logic that would soon drive the painted-cover competition of All-Story, Weird Tales, and Black Mask — and eventually the comic book.