The Argosy, Volume LXII

This is not a pulp magazine cover in the painted genre sense but a bound volume title page — the sober typography of Richard Bentley & Son, London, announcing The Argosy for the second half of 1896. No illustrated cover scene exists here: only Roman numerals, a genteel motto ("Laden with Golden Grain"), and the imprint of publishers "in Ordinary to Her Majesty." Yet this British literary miscellany is a direct ancestor of Frank Munsey's American Argosy, which by 1896 had already switched to cheap wood-pulp paper and mass fiction. Munsey's reinvention of the format — cheap paper, cheap price, serialized adventure — created the pulp magazine industry that would eventually spawn the genres comic books inherited.