The Argosy, Vol. 64 (July–December 1897)

This table of contents page from The Argosy's bound half-year volume reveals the architecture of the world's first all-fiction pulp magazine, launched by Frank Munsey in 1882 and reformatted onto cheap wood-pulp paper in 1896. No painted cover survives in this view—only the clean typography of a contents list—yet the titles tell the story: serialized adventure, domestic romance, travel writing on the Rhone, and short fiction crowding every page. The Argosy paid writers by the word and printed them by the millions, pioneering the mass-market fiction ecosystem that would feed directly into the genre comic books of the 1930s and 1940s.