John Gunnison, founder of Adventure House, takes a turn answering “3 pulp questions” this week.
John started Pulp Collector Press back in 1980; it eventually became Adventure House, which continues to sell pulps, pulp-related books, reprints and more, and recently to run auctions.
Beginning in 1991, John launched Pulp Review, which reprinted classic pulp stories. It morphed into High Adventure in 1995 and publishing bimonthly today.
In addition to High Adventure, John also publishes full-size pulp replicas, complete with the original ads and illustrations.
In 2000, John, Doug Ellis and John Locke put together “The Adventure House Guide to the Pulps,” a checklist of magazines published in the pulp era. John also reprinted pulp publisher Harold Hersey‘s biographical look at the pulp magazines, “The New Pulpwood Editor.”
Let’s hear John’s answers:
1. How were you introduced to the pulps?
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3 Pulp Questions
3 Pulp Questions is an opportunity for you to get to know fellow pulp collectors a bit better and, maybe, introduce you to pulps, authors, stories or characters that you haven’t explored.[/box]
I was reading a Doc Savage Bantam paperback sometime during the summer in the mid ’60s, while lounging in the living room. I knew that the books were reprinted from original pulp magazines, but I’d never seen a pulp.
When my mother walked through the room, she spied the book and realized that it was a Doc Savage and she remarked that she used to read those back in 1933 and 1934. “I think there might be several copies of mine in the attic.”
Well, my feet didn’t touch the stairs as I rushed up to my room where the attic door came out of the ceiling. I almost pulled the pull string out getting the drop-down ladder to come down. I spent an entire afternoon combing through each box looking for those elusive pulp magazines… alas they were not to be found.
Fast forward a couple of years, and I was on a school field trip to downtown Washington, D.C. I’ve lived in the D.C. area my whole life, but this was the first time I ever had a chance to visit the Library of Congress.
I received permission from my teacher to split away from the group, and I wandered into the mail reading room. I asked around for the section that included all the pulp magazines, and after a number of librarians telling me that I had to have written permission to view anything, I found a friendly gentleman who helped. In fact he helped so much, that he gave me a tour of what used to be the stacks where they kept all the bound pulp magazines. Row after row… shelf after shelf… we ran fingers past all the titles, until we came across Doc Savage.
I grabbed the first three volumes and I was given a chair back in the main reading room to rummage through my goodies. The covers… the smell… the rapture that was my first meeting with Doc in the original flesh. I was caught… and here I am still at it nearly 40 years later.
2. What is your most prized pulp possession?
Hard to say… It’s almost like asking me which of my children is my favorite. I still own my first Doc Savage pulp I bought — “The Annihilist” — even with a chunk out of the back cover. Paid $25 for it at a comic show… when $25 was a lot of money.
Another of my favorite pulps are my complete set of Fire Fighters. A very scarce and bizarre title from Harold Hersey.
Hersey thought every kid dreamed of becoming a fireman… so why not a magazine about firefighters? Only three issues were published and it took me decades to find the third issue… thought it didn’t exist, but was proven wrong.
3. What overlooked (pulp magazine, story, author, character, or series) would you recommend to pulp fans and why?
William Dudley Pelley
A choice for overlooked author would be William Dudley Pelley.
His fiction isn’t among the best published, but what makes him interesting to me is that he would later found the Silver Legion in 1933… the beginning of the American Nazi Party.
I like fiction that allows the current reader to see history through the eyes of the author. The country’s isolationism and military disarmament after WWI would later form the plots for the Purple Invasion in Operator #5 in the late ’30s.
Reading Pelley from the early ’20s, an anti-Semite, metaphysical and political extremist, you can almost see him forming his radical views. Reading Pelley is more informative for me than just plain fun.
I’m interested in Pelley also. There is a good biography that appeared in 2005 titled, WILLIAM DUDLEY PELLEY: A Life in Right Wing Extremism and the Occult.
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Hard to say… It’s almost like asking me which of my children is my favorite. I still own my first Doc Savage pulp I bought — “The Annihilist” — even with a chunk out of the back cover. Paid $25 for it at a comic show… when $25 was a lot of money.
I’m interested in Pelley also. There is a good biography that appeared in 2005 titled, WILLIAM DUDLEY PELLEY: A Life in Right Wing Extremism and the Occult.