I hope that during your visits to ThePulp.Net you have had a chance to look at our gallery of pulp-era news stand photos.
TPN introduced the gallery in late 1999, with four low-resolution photos from the 1930s. Since then I’ve been keeping my eye out for more and higher-quality photos of news stands displaying pulp magazines.
It’s actually quite fun searching for photos of yesterday’s pulp racks, then trying to determine when the photo was taken. I’ve had some luck on eBay over the past couple of years.
The latest addition to the collection is this photo of a young woman surrounded by magazines from early 1934. (A larger version now resides in the gallery.)
Most obvious are Unknown Worlds (February 1943) and Astounding Science-Fiction (March 1943) pulps sitting side-by-side in the upper left of the photo. In the original 8×10, you can see the spines of Army-Navy Flying Stories and Popular Sports pulps stacked on the left below what look like cigarettes.
The top row, which is mostly hidden by shadow, hints at covers showing women in distress. (See the blowup below.) There is one cover (on the far left, below) that appears to show the feet of two boxers in the ring.
My first thought was that these covers were from Terror Tales or Horror Stories (though both of those had already run their courses by ’43). They could be of similar ilk, or possibly “true crime” magazines.
Anyone else have any ideas?
