The Argosy, Vol. 65

This page opening from The Argosy — Frank Munsey's pioneering all-fiction weekly, launched in 1882 — shows no illustrated cover in the lurid painted sense that would define later pulps; instead, the magazine presents clean letterpress typography announcing Sydney Hodges's serial Colonel Fane's Secret, Chapter XIX, set at Seagrove Hall. The Argosy was the first true pulp magazine, printed on cheap wood-pulp paper and selling general fiction — romance, adventure, mystery — to a mass audience for a dime. It preceded the genre-specific pulps (Weird Tales, Black Mask, Amazing Stories) by decades, but its formula of affordable, plot-driven serial fiction directly seeded them, and through them the comic book's appetite for cliffhangers, secret identities, and hidden pasts.