The Argosy, Volume LXX

This bound volume title page—spare, typographic, utterly without illustration—belongs to the magazine that invented the pulp format. Frank Munsey's The Argosy switched to cheap wood-pulp paper in 1882 and by 1900 was filling its pages with serialized adventure, romance, and early science fiction for a working-class readership. No painted cover here: the house of George Allen, Ruskin House, London, presents only letterpress dignity and the motto 'Laden with Golden Grain.' That restraint would not last. Within a decade, rival pulps discovered that lurid painted covers sold copies, establishing the visual vocabulary—heroes, monsters, menace rendered in oils—that the comic book would later inherit wholesale.