The Argosy, Vol. 64

This interior page from The Argosy — Frank Munsey's pioneering all-fiction weekly, launched in 1882 and widely credited as the first true pulp magazine — opens a chapter of Sydney C. Grier's serial novel Peace with Honour, set against a North-West Frontier backdrop. No lurid painted cover survives in this scan; the aesthetic is purely typographic: classical serif display type, restrained chapter headings, dense justified columns on cheap wood-pulp paper. That paper, costing a dime, was the point. The Argosy proved mass audiences would buy fiction by the pound, inventing the commercial infrastructure — cheap printing, genre serialization, cliffhanger plotting — that pulp illustration would eventually electrify, and that comic books would later inherit wholesale.