250 million copies, and inspire juvenile weeklies (Brave and Bold, Might and Main, Wide
Awake Weekly and others). But meanwhile Munsey’s children’s paper was not doing too
well. He had more success with a new adult title, named Munsey’s Magazine. He worked
on the first, shortening its title to Argosy, increasing its pagecount and generalising its
fiction, until in 1896 a thick, new Argosy was born, with 192 pages printed on the
cheapest possible paper, coarse, bulky stuff known as pulpwood in the trade. Its value
for money at ten cents acted as inspiration to other publishers, especially as Argosy’s
circulation rose to half a million. The pulp magazine was born.
Pulp magazines, counting 128 pages or more, with their cheap paper bound into art
paper covers sporting ever more exciting artwork, would last for sixty years before
shrinking in size (to Pocket Digest proportions) and number (from hundreds to tens) by
- From assorted fiction they started to specialise into themes: westerns, detectives,
adventure, fantasy, horror, science-fiction and even erotica (Snappy Stories was the first
in 1912). Pulps were only briefly for the young, who quickly took to the half-price (five
cent) story weeklies. These continued into the 1920s averaging sixteen pages of cheap
paper bound within thin art paper colour covers. The boys’ heroes were cowboys, outlaws
(Jesse James Stories), college boys like William Patton’s ‘Frank Merriwell’ in Tip Top
Weekly (from 1896), and incredible inventors whose extraordinary sci-fi adventures
were recorded by ‘Noname’ in The Frank Reade Library. Inventor Reade was first read
about in Irwin’s American Novels, when he fought Red Indians with his incredible Steam
Man of the Prairies (1865).
This was the origin of a genre which would eventually flower under editorial genius
Hugo Gernsback in his monthly pulp Amazing Stories (1926). But as for the juvenile
reader, he would soon be wooed away from nickel novels by the ‘all in color for a dime’
illustrations of the comic books.
The bloodstained saga of the Penny Bloods later known (both popularly—by their
readers—and unpopularly—by those who disdained them) as the Penny Dreadfuls, has
its roots in the records of the eighteenth-century’s worst criminals, known as The
Newgate Calendar. The prime edition of this seems to be The Malefactor’s Register or
New Newgate and Tyburn Calendar, an illustrated collection published by Alex Hogg in
book format, but which had a cheap edition in penny parts, published once a week.
Pirate publishers quickly pounced on the series and printed their own, including one
James Catnach of Seven Dials, a noted publisher of broadsides of many kinds, including
criminal confessions known as ‘Goodnights’. There followed The Tell-Tale (1823),
Legends of Horror and The Terrific Register (both 1825). This last ran two years (104
penny parts) and in number eleven featured Sawney Bean and family, ‘The Monster of
Scotland’ and king of the cannibals, while The Tell-Tale saw the first English reporting of
the man who might have been Sweeney Todd: ‘Horrible Murder and Human Pie-Makers’
(1825).
The ‘father of the Penny Dreadfuls’ was Edward Lloyd, a farmer’s boy from Surrey. He
was not more than a youth when he came to London and set up as a bookseller, from
whence it was but a small step to becoming his own publisher. He was twenty-one when
he issued number one of his first partwork, Lives of the Most Notorious Highwaymen. It
ran for sixty weeks, but well before it expired, Lloyd had started three more popular
pennyworths: The Gem of Romance, The History of Pirates of All Nations and The
TYPES AND GENRES 259