A Little Bit of Non-Fiction Relating To That Which Is Considered Pulp Fiction

"Two Complete Science-Adventure Books." Why waste time being unnecessarily vague when you can tell people exactly what they're getting within the title? Do you like Science? How about Adventure? Well, you should check out this title.

Pulps are wonderful finds for a number of different reasons; pulp art is, in my humblest of opinions, one of the main reasons why these publications remain so popular. Like penny dreadfuls (great name, right? LOVE it!), dime novels, and pre-code comic books, these periodicals were not made to be kept. For ten to twenty-five cents you could purchase, read, and then dispose of said magazine before the elements did it for you. Pulps were so named because of the quality of paper they were printed on. They tanned very easily, came shoddily cut, and went brittle within a couple of years.
     Many of the stories used had been or were also printed elsewhere. The Time Machine (Hey, wasn't that a muh-muh-movie?) was published almost fifty years before this pulp hit the newsstands, so the text was already more common than, say, the artwork. Each time a publishing company circulated a story, they employed an artist to paint a new cover for it. Spice it up, you know? It's so much easier to sell the same story over and over and over if you supplement it with new imagery. Comic book fans have fallen prey to this hundreds of times. Why do you think they reprint the same comic book a dozen times--the same month it comes out--with a dozen different cover images? Because they're jerks. Greedy jerks. Because it's easier to sell multiples of the same thing when the art is different. And they've got to do something because they've ruined their own collector's market by flooding said market with overpriced garbage.

Vintage Pulps, even in Fair or Poor condition, fascinate me because they're not supposed to still exist. They were made to be thrown away, and that makes them truly collectible.

Side Note: Stay tuned for my newest comic book creation: Penny Dreadful. A comic book that will never feature multiple covers for the same issue.