Munsey's Magazine, January 1924

Munsey's Magazine, founded in 1883, pioneered the pulp magazine format that dominated American popular fiction through the mid-twentieth century. This January 1924 issue features "The Big Noise at Nice," a complete novelette by Alice Rix about matrimonial misunderstandings among the English gentry. The wood-pulp magazines like Munsey's packaged fiction across genres—adventure, romance, mystery, and the fantastical—under painted covers designed to catch a reader's eye at the newsstand. Selling for mere cents, these periodicals reached millions and established narrative conventions and visual styles that would directly influence the emerging comic book medium of the 1930s and beyond.