The Argosy, Vol. 51, No. 1

A wood-engraved interior scene shows two women in a candlelit parlor — one seated in a wingback chair in formal evening dress, one standing near a flower-draped table, both rendered with the fine crosshatching typical of late-Victorian periodical illustration. The Argosy predates the pulps proper; founded by Frank Munsey in 1882, it was among the first all-fiction magazines printed on cheap wood-pulp paper, a cost-cutting move that inadvertently named an era. By the 1890s Munsey had stripped out the genteel miscellany and packed the pages with serialized adventure, romance, and mystery — training a mass readership to hunger for story above all else. That appetite, and that paper stock, made everything that followed possible.