When I got back into the pulp/New Pulp world several years back, one publisher that caught my eye was Matt Moring‘s Altus Press, which recently renamed to Steeger Books. Making use of print-on-demand (first Lulu, later CreateSpace), their volumes were all well designed inside and out, and to me, set the bar for what quality reprints of pulp works should be.
My main interest at the time was pulp heroes, but apart from a handful of the most popular characters (Doc Savage, The Shadow, The Avenger, etc), few others had been reprinted, at least in nice book form. Even then, several characters never got a complete reprint of. Through Altus Press it looked like I would be able to get reprints of them. Of course, Altus Press, and then as Steeger Books, would go on to reprint more than just pulp heroes.
So what was it that impressed me about their reprints? First off was good design. The covers often made use of the original pulp covers, and we usually got to see on the backcover other covers that were reprinted. Text was neat and reset, whereas a few other reprinters gave you something that was not much different from a photocopy of the original.
Original interior artwork was usually included. And we often got a forward or introduction that gave us more information on the author and the character. And it was nice to get from three to six stories in a volume, which meant you could get the complete collection a few volumes, sometimes just one.
Since then, Steeger Books has expanded, adding several “Libraries” of reprint works. Many of the Thrilling pulp heroes have been reprinted, with a consistent cover style. There is the Argosy Library that reprints works and series from this and other early pulp magazines. There is the H. Bedford-Jones Library that focuses on the “King of the Pulps” with a uniform set of volumes. Frederick Nebel is another author with his own Library. The Dime Detective Library reprints many of the serialized detectives from this and related pulps. The Black Mask Library is a more recent addition. And there are others.
A recent event was that the rights owned by Popular Publications — which had bought out the Munsey magazines and others, and later was owned by Argosy Communications — were largely sold to Moring as “Steeger Properies, LLC.” Argosy would only retain a few of the more popular pulp heroes like The Spider and Operator #5. Of course, some may not realize that some pulp authors actually retained the rights to some of their works and hadn’t sold them to the publishers. Too often people assume the publishers own the rights to everything they published.
Further, under the “Wild Adventures” name, Steeger Books was the publisher of the new Doc Savage novels by Will Murray, some new Tarzan novels, and even new Spider novels. Steeger Books has put out some other New Pulp works, but mainly has been doing reprints of the classics.
One trend they’ve gone with that I’m not too keen on has been to reprint their recent Popular Publications series as single novels, such as with The Spider and Operator #5. I really was looking forward to something like their Secret Agent X series with five to six novels per volume.
But I do look forward to their new offering from their Argosy and H. Bedford-Jones Libraries, as well as other. There are several unfinished reprint series I’d like to see them continue and finish (The Green Ghost, Eric Trent, Richard Knight, etc). Hopefully this will happen.
Check them out, they put out a lot of great stuff and shouldn’t be overlooked. I have over a 100 of their works so far, and a list of further ones I want.
