A complete, restored issue of Pulp Fiction from 1896 — all 32 pages of painted-cover fiction magazines that launched science fiction, horror, and hardboiled crime, free to page through at ComicBooks.com.

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A complete issue · 32 pages · 1896

Beadle's New York Dime Library No. 897

1896 · Free to read

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About this issue

This cover illustrates "Babylon Bill the High-Roller," a serialized adventure by Lieut. A.K. Sims. The wood-engraved image depicts four roughly dressed men in what appears to be a moment of physical confrontation or intrigue—one figure lurches backward while others gesture with apparent urgency. The typography emphasizes genre conventions: bold lettering for the story title and dramatic positioning of character names. At ten cents a copy, Beadle's Dime Library exemplified the mass-market pulp magazines that dominated late nineteenth-century publishing, offering serialized tales of crime, frontier adventure, and urban intrigue to working-class readers. These publications, with their rapid-fire narratives and woodcut illustrations, established the visual and narrative formulas that would later inform comic book storytelling.

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