The Argosy, Vol. LXVI

No painted cover announces this issue — The Argosy in 1898 still presented itself as a respectable literary monthly, its title page set in dignified roman type with no illustration at all. That restraint marks a transitional moment: Frank Munsey had already converted the magazine to cheap wood-pulp paper in 1882 and dropped its price to a dime, but the lurid cover art that would define pulp culture came later. Inside, serialized adventure fiction — here Sydney Hodges's Colonel Fane's Secret, set partly in Australia — was quietly assembling the narrative machinery of plot-driven genre storytelling that hardboiled crime, weird horror, and science-fiction pulps of the 1920s and 30s would inherit wholesale, eventually passing it on to the comic book.