The Argosy, Vol. 65

This issue of The Argosy carries no lurid painted cover — only the restrained typography of a literary monthly in transition. Frank Munsey had transformed the magazine two years earlier onto cheap wood-pulp paper, cutting the price to a dime and opening it to a mass audience hungry for fiction. The interior opens Colonel Fane's Secret by Sydney Hodges at Chapter V, its prose already mid-adventure. The Argosy is the ur-pulp: before the garish cover paintings of the 1920s defined the form, Munsey's all-fiction format invented the commercial genre magazine wholesale — the direct ancestor of the science fiction, adventure, and crime pulps that would, in turn, seed the comic book industry of the 1930s.