A complete issue · 32 pages · 1884
Beadle's Pocket Library No. 5
A complete, restored issue of Pulp Fiction from 1884 — all 32 pages of painted-cover fiction magazines that launched science fiction, horror, and hardboiled crime, free to page through at ComicBooks.com.
A complete issue · 32 pages · 1884
Albert W. Aiken's serialized story opens in "The Dive," a basement saloon on the Bowery. A sixteen-year-old girl defies her employer Giacomo ("Jocky"), an Italian proprietor, refusing his demand that she steal from pedestrians. Despite her street orphanage and years of labor selling shoe-strings and buttons, she resists theft. When Jocky threatens violence, she strikes him and he draws a knife. The narrative then shifts to a brown-stone mansion on East Thirty-first Street, where wealthy retired merchant Obadiah Oltkoff confronts his feeble nephew Algernon over mounting debts—a tailor's bill of two hundred and ten dollars being the latest. Oltkoff, having paid Algernon's debts three times previously, announces this will be the final payment, hinting his nephew cannot expect to inherit his considerable fortune.
Each page has its own page — the cartoon, who’s in it, and what the satire means.