{"id":676,"date":"2010-03-26T23:55:58","date_gmt":"2010-03-27T06:55:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thepulp.net\/PulpBlogs\/YellowedPerils_test\/?p=676"},"modified":"2011-07-30T00:50:14","modified_gmt":"2011-07-30T07:50:14","slug":"the-future-of-pulps-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/yellowedperils\/2010\/03\/26\/the-future-of-pulps-part-2\/","title":{"rendered":"The future of pulps, part 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ed Hulse<\/strong>, Barry Traylor<\/strong> and Walker Martin<\/strong> made some good points in their comments to my \u201cFuture of the pulps\u201d entry<\/a> a few weeks back.<\/p>\n

Certainly, there is something intrinsically fulfulling when you hold a pulp magazine. You hold a bit of history in your hands, knowing that it was purchased off some magazine stand a half-century or more ago. Knowing that someone likely bought it for the excitment depicted on its cover and detailed inside.<\/p>\n

The collecting of physical pulp magazines shouldn’t \u2014 and won’t \u2014 go away.<\/p>\n

\"An<\/a>
An Apple iPad displays a vintage pulp in digital form<\/figcaption><\/figure>Certainly, you can travel to PulpFest<\/strong> or Windy City<\/strong> or Toronto<\/strong> or elsewhere and pick and choose among the thousands of pulps on sale at those pulp conventions<\/a>. Or you can place your bids on eBay. Or purchase directly from a pulp dealer<\/a> or fellow collector. I, like many of you, have done all three of those.<\/p>\n

Agreed, there are pulps in fine to near-pristine condition.<\/p>\n

But I would wager that the vast majority of pulp magazines aren’t in that condition. And, more than likely, not every number of every pulp title could be found in such condition. This may be more likely for those less-desirable titles \u2013 less desirable because they don’t include the better fictioneers or illustrators.<\/p>\n

The point I was trying to make the last time was that it’s time for us, the pulp community, to start thinking about long-term preservation of pulp fiction. The magazines are here today, but what about 50 or 100 years from now?<\/p>\n

I would hate to find out that stories by only the key fictioneers or featuring the most popular characters are all that survive from this significant, but largely ignored, period of America\u2019s literary heritage.<\/p>\n

Last time, I mentioned the Pulp Scans group<\/a> at Yahoo, a collection of pulp fans that has been scanning mostly science fiction pulps the past few years. They’ve done an admirable job with their limited resources.<\/p>\n

What is needed, though, is something on the scale of Google’s book scanning efforts. Something organized and well planned, so it isn’t haphazard.<\/p>\n

The drawback of that is cost. Both in acquiring the pulp magazines to scan and the actual equipment and scanning.<\/p>\n

How could that be financial mountain be overcome? Would some sort of nonprofit organization \u2014 say, a Foundation for American Popular Fiction of the 20th Century \u2014 be the way to go?<\/p>\n

It would be a shame if the vast majority of true pulp fiction disappeared in the years to come. What should we do?<\/p>\n

\u2013 William<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ed Hulse, Barry Traylor and Walker Martin made some good points in their comments to my \u201cFuture of the pulps\u201d entry a few weeks back. Certainly, there is something intrinsically fulfulling when you hold a pulp magazine. You hold a bit of history in your hands, knowing that it was purchased off some magazine stand […]<\/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":false,"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":[8,19,11],"tags":[],"hashtags":[],"class_list":["post-676","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion","category-pulppreservation","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-aU","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/yellowedperils\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/676","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=676"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/yellowedperils\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/676\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1335,"href":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/yellowedperils\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/676\/revisions\/1335"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/yellowedperils\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=676"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/yellowedperils\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=676"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/yellowedperils\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=676"},{"taxonomy":"hashtags","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/yellowedperils\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/hashtags?post=676"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}