The Argosy, Vol. 57

This issue of The Argosy carries no illustrated cover in the modern sense — only clean letterpress typography on pulp stock, the magazine's title set in spaced capitals above the date and the opening of T. W. Speight's serial The Grey Monk. Frank Munsey had relaunched The Argosy in 1882 as an all-fiction weekly printed on cheap wood-pulp paper, and by 1894 it was running novels, adventure tales, and romances in dense double-column text. That formula — affordable fiction at scale — established the commercial template the painted-cover pulps of the 1920s would amplify into science fiction, weird horror, and hardboiled crime, the direct ancestors of the comic book's genre vocabulary.