This issue of The Argosy carries no lurid painted cover — it presents as a dignified literary magazine, its title set in spaced serif capitals above a dateline and a chapter opening from Sydney C. Grier's serial Peace with Honour, a frontier adventure set in Central Asia. Frank Munsey had relaunched The Argosy in 1882 as an all-fiction weekly printed on cheap wood-pulp paper, accidentally naming the format that would define American popular culture for sixty years. By 1897 it ran novels, serials, and short fiction across every genre — adventure, romance, mystery — paying writers by the word and readers by the dime. That engine of cheap, fast fiction directly seeded the genre categories — science fiction, weird horror, hardboiled crime — the comic book would later inherit and amplify.
About this artifact
- Date
- October 1897
- Rights
- Public domain — free to view, share, and reuse.
- Restoration
- Digitally restored and hosted by comicbooks.com.
Part of our mission to preserve and restore the public-domain heritage of the medium.