A history of ‘pulp magazine’

Every so often someone raises a question online that basically asks: Did the folks putting out the pulp magazines call them “pulps”?

The quick answer is yes.

But who first called them that — pulp magazines or just pulps — and when isn’t certain. Of course, those terms derive from the low-quality, wood-pulp paper that the magazines were printed on.

Let’s take a look at some instances where those or similar terms were used:

The Editor, a publication of Author’s Weekly, refers to “pulps” and “pulp magazine” several times in its Sept. 21, 1929, article “Working for the Pulps.”

Erle Stanley Gardner writes about the “wood-pulp magazines” in his introduction to H. Bedford-Jones‘ 1932 book, “The Graduate Fictioneer.”

A brief “Comings, Goings” item in Time magazine for Jan. 23, 1933, mentions “woodpulps” and “pulp magazine” when discussing the frequent births and deaths of newsstand magazines.

In 1937 in “Pulpwood Editor,” Harold Hersey, who worked as an editor for Street & Smith, Clayton Publications and Bernarr Macfadden and published his own line of pulps, most often calls them “pulpwood magazines,” but refers to them as “pulps” numerous times.

Others may have applied similarly descriptive names to our favorite fiction magazines well before these instances. (But I haven’t turned up any specific mentions.)

Let’s turn to Google Lab’s Ngram Viewer, a “phrase-graphing tool” that searches through more than 5.2 million books in Google’s digital library for references to letter combinations, words or phrases.

Searching for “pulp magazine” turns up the graph above (click to enlarge), which shows a slight bump of mentions beginning around the time of Argosy‘s 1896 rebirth as the first pulp magazine. Mentions take off in the early 1920s, peaking in the mid-1940s and again in 1986.

A comparison of “pulp magazine” and “fiction magazine” results in the graph below.

Clearly, “fiction magazine” has had a much longer regular use. Of course, “fiction magazine” can refer any magazine publishing fiction, not just pulp magazines.

So, “pulp magazine” — or simply the “pulps” — isn’t something that came into vogue after the fact, but a descriptive name that was in use during the pulp era.