The Argosy, Vol. 64

This December 1897 issue of The Argosy presents no illustrated cover in the modern sense — just crisp letterpress typography on plain stock, opening directly to Sydney C. Grier's serialized adventure novel Peace with Honour, Chapter XXIII. That restraint marks where pulp history begins. Frank Munsey had converted The Argosy to all-fiction on cheap wood-pulp paper in 1882, and by the 1890s it was the proving ground for the genre fiction — adventure, romance, frontier tales — that later pulps would turbocharge with lurid painted covers. The magazine that invented the pulp format hadn't yet invented the pulp cover; that visual revolution was still a decade away, waiting for artists and editors bold enough to put the action outside the book.