From: "Ted White" <twhite8 at cox.net>
To: "WSFA members" <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: 17 Boxes of SF & Pulp magazines
Date: Tue, 5 Apr 2005 21:40:46 -0400
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>
----- Original Message -----
From: "dicconf" <dicconf at radix.net>
To: "WSFA members" <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>
Sent: Tuesday, April 05, 2005 1:56 PM
Subject: [WSFA] Re: 17 Boxes of SF & Pulp magazines
>
> On Tue, 5 Apr 2005, Ted White wrote:
>
> > >From the description ("They range in dates from the mid-1960s to the
> > mid-1990s.") there are *no* pulps at all in this lot -- only
digest-sized
> > magazines. The digest replaced the pulp in the course of the '50s.
>
> "Pulp" refers to the paper they're printed on (it used to be a little
> coarser than is now the case), like Newsprint or slightly better. The
> sizes were bedsheet, standard, and digest. ("Standard" was the normal
> size for _all_ pulps -- stf, detective, western, romance and what not.)
> "Bedsheet" was a size ASF tried just as World War Twice broke out; paper
> shortages forced them to abandon it. (Complaints from readers who found
> it clumsy may have also played a role.) "Digest" (from the size of the
> eponymous Reader's Digest) became the normal size during the Second World
> War and such mags as F&SF, Galaxy, and Avon Fantasy Reader never were any
> other size. But there was never any such _size_ as "pulp".
You could get a strong argument on that point over on the PulpMags list.
But in actual practice, "pulps" were magazines printed on pulp paper and
about the same size as a comic book (there were two "pulp" sizes, both the
same width but one a half inch taller), with untrimmed edges (making
thumbing through a copy difficult). (There were exceptions: a few had
trimmed edges and some varied a bit in size.)
To both the public and their publishers these were "the pulps." Although
their content varied wildly in nature and quality they became known, in the
public mind, as garishly-colored covers covering hack-written trash. (The
garish colors were often required by a three-color printing process which
turned blacks into muddy browns -- so artists stayed with the primary
colors.) "Pulps" were, in the minds of many Americans, somewhat
disreputable.
This is what Street & Smith, the publisher of not only ASTOUNDING and
UNKNOWN but also of DOC SAVAGE and THE SHADOW, and once the publisher of
many "dime novels," was looking to escape as the '30s rolled over into the
'40s. The "bedsheet" issues they published were a (trimmed-edge) attempt
to escape the pulp ghetto in 1942. And when WW2 paper shortages hit them,
as you note, they moved to the "digest" size.
At that time only two magazines were using that size: READER'S DIGEST and
ELLERY QUEEN'S MYSTERY MAGAZINE, the latter having nicely dodged the "pulp"
bullet (but decades later EQMM would acquire that quintessential pulp,
BLACK MASK). S&S decided to try the digest size, and at the same time
began using covers painted in sombre tones -- browns, grays, blacks, with
the warm colors only in pale pastels -- all in an attempt to distance their
publications from the bad odor associated with "pulps." I'm not going to
go upstairs to check my magazine collection, but I believe S&S made this
move circa 1944 or '45. (Curiously, circa 1948 they made DOC SAVAGE and
THE SHADOW pulps again -- untrimmed edges and all -- but folded them a year
later.)
No other magazines immediately joined the move to digest-size. No pulps
really ever did (the last remaining pulp, RANCH ROMANCES, went
trimmed-edges in the '60s), but SF magazines started using the format
(following ASTOUNDING) with THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY (F&SF with its second
issue) in late 1949. GALAXY joined the group in 1950, and after that most
of the new SF titles that followed (like OTHER WORLDS, IMAGINATION, et al)
in the next few years were all digest-sized. A revived prewar SF magazine,
MARVEL SCIENCE STORIES, flitted back and forth between digest and pulp (a
couple digest issues, a pulp issue, another digest...), and the Columbia SF
pulps, FUTURE and SCIENCE FICTION, did make a mid-'50s transition to digest
(but Columbia's SCIENCE FICTION QUARTERLY went to trimmed edges instead).
The digests lacked the bad odor of the pulps. They were "respectable" for
a teenager to be seen reading. They were, to a large degree, the very
antithesis of "the pulps." (In simple fact, SF was always a bit outside
the purview of the "real" pulps -- mostly written by separate writers, and
often purchased by readers who did not buy non-SF pulps. The original,
trimmed-edged, bedsheet-sized issues of AMAZING STORIES and SCIENCE
WONDER/AIR WONDER/WONDER STORIES -- as well as their Quarterly cousins --
were not "pulps" in size or format, and were priced a dime more.
ASTOUNDING STORIES OF SUPERSCIENCE, launched in 1930 and the third SF
magazine after AMAZING and WONDER, was the first real pulp SF magazine in
both size/format and regular authors, and the first to be edited to pulp
editorial values.)
Unfortunately, the first three SF digests -- ASTOUNDING, F&SF and GALAXY --
were a bit stuffy in their attempts to avoid pulpishness. ASTOUNDING had
regular features, including a letter column, but the letters it published
had not been "fannish" for more than a decade. Neither GALAXY nor F&SF had
letter columns, and F&SF had no editorials, either (although the story
blurbs conveyed some editorial personality). H. L. Gold's editorials in
GALAXY were routinely anti-letter column, anti-fannish, and most often
page-wasters.
People forget how many SF magazines there were in the first half of the
'50s. I believe the official count for one year (1953?) was 52. That's
52 separate titles, many of them published monthly. At this same time the
pulp magazines were dying. They had been a form of cheap entertainment.
Television offered even cheaper entertainment. TV killed the pulps. The SF
magazines survived this pulp die-off (although those who did not convert to
digest, like STARTLING and THRILLING WONDER -- despite their titles two of
the best SF magazines of the decade -- died with the pulp lines of which
they were a part). But there were too many SF magazines for the market to
sustain, and quite a few of those 52 titles did not last long. Still, it
took the Congressionally-mandated death of American News -- the major
national magazine wholesaler -- in 1958 to kill off half the SF magazines
still left, like Larry Shaw's INFINITY.
At any rate, most people of a certain age -- those who were around before
1955 -- know very well what "a pulp" is, and "a digest" isn't "a pulp."
--Ted White