The Argosy, Vol. 65

This issue of The Argosy carries no painted cover illustration — only clean letterpress typography announcing its contents, among them Sydney Hodges's serial Colonel Fane's Secret. That restraint marks the magazine's transitional moment: Frank Munsey had already converted The Argosy to all-fiction on cheap wood-pulp paper in 1882, inventing the pulp format, but the lurid painted covers that would define the form came later. What this page offers instead is the thing itself — fiction sold by volume and velocity, ten cents' worth of adventure, mystery, and romance printed on rough paper and aimed at a mass audience. Every genre the comic book would later inherit — adventure, crime, the uncanny — was being assembled here, story by story, long before the first four-color cover screamed from a newsstand.