Genres
Pulp magazine
Inexpensive fiction magazines published from 1896 to about 1955, named for the cheap wood pulp paper they were printed on.
Pulp magazines were inexpensive fiction magazines published from 1896 until around 1955, named for the cheap wood pulp paper they were printed on, in contrast to the glossies and slicks on better stock. A typical issue ran 128 pages at 7 by 10 inches with ragged, untrimmed edges, succeeding the penny dreadfuls and dime novels of the 19th century. They were best known for lurid and sensational subject matter, though that reputation reflected only a small fraction of their content: Weird Tales, Black Mask, Amazing Stories and Argosy serialized Chandler, Hammett, Lovecraft and Bradbury, and many classic science fiction and crime novels first appeared in their pages. Hero pulps featuring The Shadow and Doc Savage are sometimes seen as forerunners of the superhero comic, and the pulps themselves as predecessors of the paperback.
The pulps are serialized genre fiction's origin point: hardboiled crime grew out of Black Mask, and their taste for the lurid and sensational survives in the amoral register of grimdark fantasy.