PulpFest 2026 was a landmark.
The convention drew 486 attendees — about 350 preregistrations and the rest walk-ups. That’s a record for PulpFest and its predecessor, Pulpcon. I’m on the organizing committee, and we announced the figure during our look ahead to next year on Saturday evening.
As I’ve said before, PulpFest is the people who attend. You can buy pretty much any pulp magazine on your want-list online, but you don’t often have a chance to talk face-to-face with almost 500 pulp fans. I end up getting only around five hours of sleep each night because of that.
Bull sessions broke out across the hotel lobby, with FarmerCon, Doc Con, and The Shadow Con folks congregating around tables to catch up from last year or debate hot topics related to Philip José Farmer, Doc Savage, or The Shadow, often into the early morning hours.
There were a lot of familiar faces in Mars, Pa., last week. But there were quite a number of first-timers, too. Some longtime fans finally made it to PulpFest, and there were also a lot of BookTubers.
We had a few BookTubers last year, and more showed up this year. PulpFest plans to devote a panel to them next year.
(Watch for more on the BookTubers in a separate post next week.)
For the first time, PulpFest opened on Wednesday evening. The program was “A Century of Robert K. Abbett,” a retrospective by Henry G. Franke III, of the Burroughs Bibliophiles, and artist Mark Wheatley.
Abbett did a few pieces of art for Zane Grey’s Western Magazine and Argosy (after it had become a men’s adventure magazine) in the early 1950s, but is better known in the pulp community for the covers he painted for Edgar Rice Burroughs paperback reprints.
Programming continued Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, for a total of 16 presentations, many of them tied to this year’s anniversaries: the 100th of Amazing Stories and Ghost Stories. (Stay tuned for new episodes of the Pulp Tales podcast, which will include audio recordings from most of the panels.)
Issue number 35 of The Pulpster debuted at the convention. It covered both of those anniversaries and marked a third: 130 years since the first pulp magazine, The Argosy.
But as always, the formal programming was only part of PulpFest. Much of the convention’s real traffic, and many of its conversations, flowed through the dealers’ room.
Collectors consulted their want-lists and browsed through boxes and boxes of pulps, paperbacks, and other materials.
The 2026 Munsey, voted on each year by previous recipients, went to longtime fan Chris Kalb. He has run two hero-pulp websites, The 86th Floor and The Spider Returns, for decades, and he created the first PulpFest website. He’s also co-publisher with his brother David at Age of Aces Books and a go-to designer for Murania Press and other pulp reprints.
Capping off the con was Saturday evening’s auction. There were quite a number of hero pulps, but many bidders held back so that Daryl Morrissey could complete his collection of all 181 Doc Savage pulp magazines.
It’s always great to see longtime friends at PulpFest, but the influx of new faces is what will keep PulpFest — and pulp collecting — alive in the years to come.
My buddy Jeff Shanks made it this year and gave a talk on the Shaver Mystery. He lives here in Tallahassee, too, so he made the same two-day, 2,000-mile drive that I make every year — and he was lamenting the fact that it took him so long to finally do it.
Be like Jeff and attend; don’t keep putting it off.
PulpFest returns Aug. 5-8, 2027. I hope to see you there.
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