The Argosy, January–June 1898: Table of Contents

What survives here is not a painted cover but something equally revealing: the contents page of The Argosy for the first half of 1898, the oldest all-fiction pulp magazine in American publishing. Frank Munsey had relaunched it on cheap wood-pulp paper in 1882, cutting the cover price and opening the floodgates for genre fiction at scale. The table lists serialized adventure, sensation romance, and character studies — Sydney Hodges, Payne Smith, Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler — running across hundreds of pages per volume. No lurid painted cover yet; that visual language was still evolving. But The Argosy's format — cheap paper, cheap price, fiction wall-to-wall — is precisely the commercial and editorial template every pulp that followed, and every comic book after that, was built upon.