A new pulp heyday?

Isn’t it a wonderful time to be a pulp fan?

That thought popped into my mind a few days ago when I picked up my mail: a flyer and a magazine.

The flyer was a fold-out promotion for Heritage Auction‘s 2023/2024 Pulp Showcase Auctions, the first of which closes later this week on Thursday, Jan. 26.

Heritage is auctioning off an incredible collection of pulp magazines owned by Jack and Joanie Kump. The first batch, titled “Good Girl Art,” features pulp rarities and classic covers, such as Mystery Adventures, Romantic Detective, Saucy Romantic Adventures, Spicy-Adventure Stories, and Breezy Stories, among others.

This series of auctions will bring to market some of the most-desirable pulp magazines since the late Frank Robinson‘s collection of more than 10,000 items was auctioned by Adventure House in 2012. At one time, Jack Kump had around 3,500 pulps in his collection.

As a matter of fact, Kump’s rare issue of Zeppelin Stories (June 1929), the one that features the classic-titled story “Gorilla of the Gas Bags,” came from the Robinson collection.

After the good-girl art batch, subsequent auctions will focus on science fiction and fantasy, detective and mystery, horror and Weird Tales, heroes, war and aviation, adventure and jungle, western and romance, first issues and one-shots, and, finally, “The Wonderful World of Pulps.”

The mail also brought the latest issue of The New Yorker, Condé Nast’s weekly magazine. Condé Nast, which has been described as being the originator of the “class publication,” of course, purchased back in 1959 Street & Smith Publications, which was once one of the preeminent publishers of pulp magazines.

But that wasn’t what caught my attention. It was the magazine’s back cover: an advertisement for the new Doc Savage book, The Perfect Assassin. It and 2021’s The Shadow are Condé Nast’s attempt to use the James Patterson fiction mill to keep alive its two most-famous pulp names.

Love or hate the books, both are introducing classic pulp characters — or at least a semblance of them — to a new audience. The worst case is that people won’t bother reading them; alternatively — and what we should hope for — is that those who do read them may want to read more and turn to reprints of the pulp-era stories.

Thanks to the likes of Steeger Books, Age of Aces, Adventure House, and other small publishing houses, classic pulp stories are abundantly available. More seem to be in print today than during the paperback reprint heyday of the 1960s and ’70s.

There’s hope for a new generation of pulp fans.