I’ve mentioned before that — while there are a number of black-and-white photos of pulps on newsstands — I would love to see a vintage color photo of a newsstand covered in pulps.
A week ago today, artist Avi Katz sent me the best example of what it must have been like to stand in front of such a newsstand.
He has been colorizing vintage black-and-white photos and posting them on his blog Painted Back since early 2012. A comment on a photo on display at Shorpy put him to work colorizing a 1942 newsstand.
Katz said he spent much of the past year searching for scans of magazine covers, then applying those colors to the dozens of magazines in the photo.
I know a lot of you have seen Katz’s colorized photo on Shorpy, as well as discussions about it on Facebook and various pulp newsgroups. But I couldn’t resist posting the image here (with Katz’s approval, of course).
Magazine stands are still loaded with colorful magazines; just take a trip down to a nearby bookstore or newsstand. But stands overloaded with colorful pulp magazines were long gone by the time I was born.
This may be the closest many of us ever get. Thanks, Avi!
(Oh, if you’re interested in owning your own print of the colorized photo, head over to Katz’s Etsy store.)
FINAL PULP SHOW OF THE YEAR: Pulp Adventurecon 2014 is this Saturday, Nov. 1, in Bordentown, N.J., just outside of Trenton.
In addition to 50 vendor tables of pulps, paperbacks, movie memorabilia and more, Robert Gould, the son of pulp artist John Fleming Gould, will be in attendance.
The show, put on by Rich Harvey and his Bold Venture Press, runs from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Ramada Inn of Bordentown. Admission is only $5.
A LOOK AT PULP PAINTINGS: Matt Moring over at Altus Press has posted 50 photographs taken at the Portland (Maine) Main Library’s exhibit, “The Pulps: The Definitive Survey of a Re-Discovered American Genre from the Lesser Collection at the New Britain Museum of American Art.”
The exhibit runs through Dec. 26, so there’s plenty of time to visit if you’re in the area. If not, then check out Matt’s photos.
As he says, “If you’ve got Bob Lesser’s book (“Pulp Art: Original Cover Paintings for the Great American Pulp Magazines“), you’ve seen most of these, but there’s nothing like seeing them up close.”
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