The Argosy, Vol. 64

This issue of The Argosy carries no painted cover — only clean letterpress typography announcing its title, date, and opening serial: Sydney C. Grier's Peace with Honour, Chapter XXI. That austerity is historically telling. Frank Munsey had relaunched The Argosy in 1882 as the first all-fiction magazine printed on cheap wood-pulp paper, and by 1897 it was the template every lurid successor would inherit. The gaudy painted covers came later; here the selling point was sheer volume of adventure fiction for a dime. The genres that would ignite pulp illustration — lost-world romance, imperial adventure, hardboiled crime — were already accumulating inside these plain pages, waiting for the painted covers and bold display type that would define the form by the 1920s.