Illustrator Walter Baumhofer (1904-87) had a long career doing artwork in many areas. I think for most pulp fan, they know him for his Doc Savage cover artwork, starting with the first issue. That piece set the image of the “pulp” Doc Savage in the same way that James Bama‘s re-imaging Doc for the Bantam paperbacks did for the modern image.
However, he had a much wider career. Within the world of pulps, he actually started working for Adventure doing interior illustrations in 1925, when he moved to doing covers, the first for Danger Trail. He started working for Clayton Publications and its editor Harold Hersey, and when Hersey moved to Magazine Publishers, Baumhofer followed him.
In 1927, Baumhofer started doing covers for Street & Smith, but what made them really take notice of him was when he hired a model at his own expense and painted a western cover on spec, showing an outlaw in a long, yellow slicker in 1932. This got him a contract to do 50 covers a year for Street & Smith.
This is what lead to him doing the Doc Savage covers, which he did, along with S&S’s Pete Rice series, for the first three years before being replaced on both by R.G. Harris.
Baumhofer also worked for Popular Publications, doing covers for Dime Western, Dime Mystery (so doing “shudder” pulp covers), and the first cover for The Spider (his only cover for that series).
It appears his career as a pulp cover artist lasted until 1941. Around 1937, he started doing covers for other magazines such as Colliers, Esquire, Cosmopolitan, and others. And in the 1950s, he started doing covers for the men’s adventure magazines, but by the late ’50s retired from this to do portraits, landscapes and Western scenes for fine art galleries.
Now, while you can find scans of his covers out there, there are a few works worth getting. One is Walter Baumhofer: Pulp Art Masters from Adventure House in 2007. It’s part of their too-short-lived Pulp Art Masters series. Coming in at a little over 100 pages long, this book focuses on just his pulp-cover career with a lot of pulp covers and a listing of all the ones known.
Then in 2014, Illustration magazine did an issue, #44, devoted to Baumhofer with an article by David Saunders, son of pulp artist Norm Saunders. The 70-page article took up most of the issue, and covered Baumhofer’s life and career. This lead to the Illustrated Press doing a full hardback book, done as a Kickstarter campaign. Coming in at over 200 pages, it expanded on that original issue. Here you can see his early interior pulp artwork. We learn that Bill Cuff was the first model Baumhofer used for Doc Savage. However, as Bill had thining hair, it was Baumhofer’s hair that was used for Doc. Later, he used Carl Hewitt. And we learned the reason he stopped working for Street & Smith was that he was getting better pay at Popular Publications and the slick magazines.
The book also has a several page checklist of all his pulp artwork, both covers and interiors, and his last slick/MAM covers, paperback covers, ads, and movie posters.
Sadly, the Illustrated Press volume is out of print. I wish Illustrated Press would do a reprint of it. I’m glad I got a copy when I did. If you can find it. The one from Adventure House is still available, along with the other volume in their Pulp Art Masters series.
