|
Pulp magazines (often referred to as "the pulps") are inexpensive fiction magazines that were published from 1896 through the 1950s. The term ''pulp'' derives from the cheap wood pulp paper on which the magazines were printed; in contrast, magazines printed on higher quality paper were called "glossies" or "slicks". The typical pulp magazine had 128 pages; it was wide by high, and thick, with ragged, untrimmed edges. The pulps gave rise the term pulp fiction in reference to run-of-the-mill low quality literature. In their first decades, pulps were most often priced at ten cents per magazine, while competing slicks cost 25 cents a piece. Pulps were the successors to the penny dreadfuls, dime novels, and short fiction magazines of the 19th century. Although many respected writers wrote for pulps, the magazines were best known for their lurid and exploitative stories and sensational cover art. Modern superhero comic books are sometimes considered descendants of "hero pulps"; pulp magazines often featured illustrated novel-length stories of heroic characters, such as The Shadow, Doc Savage, and The Phantom Detective. ==Origins== The first "pulp" was Frank Munsey's revamped ''Argosy Magazine'' of 1896, with about 135,000 words (192 pages) per issue, on pulp paper with untrimmed edges, and no illustrations, even on the cover. The steam-powered printing press had been in widespread use for some time, enabling the boom in dime novels; prior to Munsey, however, no one had combined cheap printing, cheap paper and cheap authors in a package that provided affordable entertainment to young working-class people. In six years ''Argosy'' went from a few thousand copies per month to over half a million.〔"A Two-Minute History of the Pulps", in ''The Adventure House Guide to the Pulps'', edited by Doug Ellis, John Locke, and John Gunnison. Silver Spring, MD, Adventure House, 2000. (p. ii–iv).〕 Street & Smith, a dime novel and boys' weekly publisher, was next on the market. Seeing ''Argosys success, they launched ''The Popular Magazine'' in 1903, which they billed as the "biggest magazine in the world" by virtue of its being two pages (the interior sides of the front and back cover) longer than ''Argosy''. Due to differences in page layout however, the magazine had substantially less text than ''Argosy''. ''The Popular Magazine'' did introduce color covers to pulp publishing, and the magazine began to take off when the publishers in 1905 acquired the rights to serialize ''Ayesha'', by H. Rider Haggard, a sequel to his popular novel ''She''. Haggard's Lost World genre influenced several key pulp writers, including Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, Talbot Mundy and Abraham Merritt.〔See Lee Server, ''Encyclopedia of Pulp Fiction Writers'' (2002), pg.131.〕 In 1907, the cover price rose to 15 cents and 30 pages were added to each issue; along with establishing a stable of authors for each magazine, this change proved successful and circulation began to approach that of ''Argosy''. Street and Smith's next innovation was the introduction of specialized genre pulps, with each magazine focusing on a particular genre, such as detective stories, romance, etc.〔Reynolds, Quentin. ''The Fiction Factory ; Or, From Pulp Row to Quality Street: The Story of 100 Years of Publishing at Street & Smith''. Random House, 1955. (Covers: Street & Smith, Nick Carter, Max Brand, Buffalo Bill, Frank Merriwell, Gerald Smith, Richard Duffy, Frederick Faust, dime novel, Horatio Alger, Henry Ralston, Ned Buntline, Ormond Smith, Beadle's, Edward Stratemeyer, detective fiction, Laura Jean Libbey, ''Astounding Science Fiction'', Edith Evans)〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア(Wikipedia)』 ■ウィキペディアで「pulp magazine」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|