{"id":2488,"date":"2013-05-06T10:50:25","date_gmt":"2013-05-06T14:50:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/yellowedperils\/?p=2488"},"modified":"2013-05-06T10:46:27","modified_gmt":"2013-05-06T14:46:27","slug":"a-history-of-pulp-magazine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/yellowedperils\/2013\/05\/06\/a-history-of-pulp-magazine\/","title":{"rendered":"A history of ‘pulp magazine’"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

\"PulpThe quick answer is yes.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Let’s take a look at some instances where those or similar terms were used:<\/p>\n

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

Erle Stanley Gardner<\/strong> writes about the “wood-pulp magazines” in his introduction to H. Bedford-Jones<\/strong>‘ 1932 book, “The Graduate Fictioneer.”<\/p>\n

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

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

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.)<\/p>\n

Let’s turn to Google Lab’s Ngram Viewer<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

\""pulp<\/a><\/p>\n

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

A comparison of “pulp magazine” and “fiction magazine”<\/a> results in the graph below.<\/p>\n

\""pulp<\/a><\/p>\n

Clearly, “fiction magazine” has had a much longer regular use. Of course, “fiction magazine” can refer any<\/em> magazine publishing fiction, not just pulp magazines.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","inline_featured_image":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_has_post_settings":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_wp_rev_ctl_limit":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"hashtags":[],"class_list":["post-2488","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pulps"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2qgXO-E8","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/yellowedperils\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2488","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/yellowedperils\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/yellowedperils\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/yellowedperils\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/yellowedperils\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2488"}],"version-history":[{"count":22,"href":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/yellowedperils\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2488\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2515,"href":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/yellowedperils\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2488\/revisions\/2515"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/yellowedperils\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2488"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/yellowedperils\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2488"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/yellowedperils\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2488"},{"taxonomy":"hashtags","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/yellowedperils\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/hashtags?post=2488"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}