The All-Story, August 1909

A young woman in a wide-brimmed hat, parasol tilted against a breeze, sits before a wooden easel on a grassy bluff, brush and palette in hand — an image of genteel Edwardian leisure rendered in soft gouache tones. The bold Art Nouveau lettering of The All-Story crowns the scene; ten cents a copy, one dollar by the year, published by Frank A. Munsey Company of New York and London. Munsey's wood-pulp monthly was among the first magazines to run fiction exclusively, and its pages launched Edgar Rice Burroughs — Tarzan, John Carter — into print. The painted cover here predates those sensations, its pastoral mood soon displaced by the action illustration that would define pulp art and flow directly into the comic book cover's grammar of immediate drama.