Ed Hulse

During the 20th century's first half, millions of Americans flocked to newsstands every month in search of thrills provided by all-fiction magazines printed on cheap pulp paper. These periodicals introduced and popularized such famous characters as Tarzan, Zorro, Sam Spade, Buck Rogers, Doc Savage, Hopalong Cassidy, and Conan the Barbarian, to name just a few. The producers of pulp fiction churned out their vigorous and occasionally outré stories at a feverish pace, generally for a mere penny per word. Some eventually graduated from the pulps to become world-famous, best-selling authors—among them Edgar Rice Burroughs, Max Brand, Erle Stanley Gardner, Ray Bradbury, Louis L'Amour, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler. Often derided in their own time, the “rough paper” magazines had an incalculable effect on American pop culture. They gave birth to modern science fiction and the hardboiled detective story, but also to plot devices, character types, and storytelling innovations that live on in today's most popular novels, movies, and TV shows.Illustrated with more than 600 magazine covers and original paintings, THE BLOOD 'N' THUNDER GUIDE TO PULP FICTION presents a complete and lively history of this unique literary form, covering genres individually and identifying key titles, authors, and stories. It also offers advice on collecting the vintage magazines and directs readers to recently published reprints of classic pulp.

The Blood 'n' Thunder Guide to Pulp Fiction

Robert Weinberg

Douglas Ellis

A team of experts in each of the ten major Pulp genres, from action Pulps to spicy Pulps and more, chart for the first time the complete history of Pulp magazines-the stories and their writers, the graphics and their artists, and, of course, the publishers, their market, and readers. Each chapter in the book, which is illustrated with more than 400 examples of the best Pulp graphics (many from the Editors' collections--among the world's largest) is organized in a clear and accessible way, starting with an introductory overview of the genre, followed by a selection of the best covers and interior graphics, organized chronologically through the chapter. All images are fully captioned (many are in essence "nutshell" histories in themselves). Two special features in each chapter focus on topics of particular interest (such as extended profiles of Daisy Bacon, Pulp author and editor of Love Story, the hugely successful romance Pulp, and of Harry Steeger, co-founder of Popular Publications in 1930 and originator of the "Shudder Pulp" genre). With an overall Introduction on "The Birth of the Pulps" by Doug Ellis, and with two additional chapters focusing on the great Pulp writers and the great Pulp artists, The Art of the Pulps covers every aspect of this fascinating genre; it is the first definitive visual history of the Pulps.

An Illustrated History

The Art of the Pulps

The Shadow, The Spider, The Avenger, Doc Savage, The Black Bat, The Phantom Detective - these swashbuckling heroes of mid-20th-century pulp fiction all had one thing in common: They fought crime from outside the law, unhindered by red tape and unmindful of such legal niceties as due process. They fought with fists and guns, for the most part hiding their true identities beneath outlandish costume and grotesque disguises. This collection of essays by distinguished pulp-fiction aficionados chronicles the era of single-character magazines from offbeat angles and with keen insight. The pieces herein analyze key stories and characters while offering rare, behind-the-scenes glimpses of authors and editors at work, crafting and polishing the pulp-paper fever dreams that enthralled millions of young readers during the Great Depression, World War II, and beyond. Ed Hulse, editor of BLOOD 'N' THUNDER, the award-winning journal of adventure, mystery and melodrama, has assembled these affectionate essays with loving care and a discerning eye for the high-water marks in this phase of American popular culture. This third volume in the series BLOOD 'N' THUNDER PRESENTS, like its predecessors, is profusely illustrated with pulp-magazine covers and original artwork.

The Great Pulp Heroes

Fighting Crime One Dime at a Time

This companion volume to DISTRESSED DAMSELS AND MASKED MARAUDERS continues Ed Hulse's history of the silent-era movie serial. It covers the "chapter plays" released by such companies as Universal, Vitagraph, Mutual, Paramount, Arrow, Mascot, Rayart, and members of the Edison Trust. The fascinating history of these pioneering productions - more than 190 episodic thrillers made between 1914 and 1929 - is told in 160,000 words and illustrated with hundreds of rare vintage photos, posters, lobby cards, magazine ads, and even frame blowups from surviving film elements. The product of nearly 25 years of research, HANDSOME HEROES AND VICIOUS VILLAINS is the last word on this unique form of American film entertainment.

More Cliffhanger Serials of the Silent-Movie Era

Handsome Heroes and Vicious Villains

For more than 14 years, the semi-professional journal BLOOD 'N' THUNDER chronicled the evolution of adventure, mystery and melodrama in pulp fiction, radio drama, comic strips, and motion pictures produced in the first five decades of the Twentieth Century. Exhaustively researched and engagingly written by hobbyists, historians, and academics, the non-fiction pieces in BLOOD 'N' THUNDER raised the bar for scholars of American popular culture. This anthology collects some of the most memorable works to grace the journal's pages, along with the illustrations that accompanied their initial publication. Such popular pulp heroes as The Spider and Doc Savage are explored. Early multi-media appearances of famous fictional characters Zorro, Tarzan, Hopalong Cassidy, and the Green Hornet are covered in depth. Lengthy biographical essays profile such giants of the pulp-magazine industry as publisher Frank A. Munsey, writer Gordon Young, and artist Norman Saunders. The Golden Age of American popular culture is celebrated in each and every selection, with BLOOD 'N' THUNDER contributors offering previously unreported and long-forgotten facts. Painting a vivid picture of a bygone era, the material contained herein is not only educational but entrancing as well.

The Blood 'n' Thunder Sampler

The top-selling, best-reviewed title in Murania Press history is now available in a newly revised and expanded edition! With nearly 2000 copies in print, sold in 23 countries, THE BLOOD 'N' THUNDER GUIDE TO PULP FICTION has been acclaimed one of the foremost (the foremost, in the opinion of some) reference books covering the subject. During the 20th century's first half, millions of Americans flocked to newsstands every month in search of thrills provided by all-fiction magazines printed on cheap pulp paper. These periodicals introduced and popularized such famous characters as Tarzan, Zorro, Sam Spade, Buck Rogers, Doc Savage, Hopalong Cassidy, and Conan the Barbarian, to name just a few. The producers of pulp fiction churned out their vigorous and occasionally outré stories at a feverish pace, generally for a mere penny per word. Some eventually graduated from the pulps to become world-famous, best-selling authors-among them Edgar Rice Burroughs, Max Brand, Erle Stanley Gardner, Ray Bradbury, Louis L'Amour, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler. Often derided in their own time, the "rough paper" magazines had an incalculable effect on American pop culture. They gave birth to modern science fiction and the hardboiled detective story, but also to plot devices, character types, and storytelling innovations that live on in today's most popular novels, movies, and TV shows. Illustrated with 750 magazine covers and original paintings, THE BLOOD 'N' THUNDER GUIDE TO PULP FICTION presents a complete and lively history of this unique literary form, covering genres individually and identifying key titles, authors, and stories. It also offers advice on collecting the vintage magazines and directs readers to recently published reprints of classic pulp. This handbook is a perfect companion piece to 2017's THE ART OF THE PULPS, co-edited by Ed Hulse. Along with addressing previous omissions and making editorial corrections, we've added nearly 10,000 words of new copy (recently uncovered facts and additional analysis) to the existing manuscript. We've also included more cover reproductions, among them at least a half dozen important first issues left out of the original 2013 edition. What's more, we've updated the four appendices, which offer carefully-compiled lists of mass-market pulp-fiction anthologies, reference books about the pulps, small-press publishers specializing in rough-paper fiction reprints, and a collector's guide to building a comprehensive pulp-magazine collection. Perhaps most importantly, the book now has a complete index - the lack of which was the only substantive complaint we've ever received about the earlier GUIDE. The new material has been added (without significantly increasing the book's page count and list price) by slightly reducing the text's font size, thus getting more words per page. We also filled blank pages that previously separated chapters. The 2013 GUIDE had 414 pages, the 2018 revision has 428.

During the pulp era - roughly the first five decades of the 20th century - more than one thousand all-fiction magazines reached the nation's newsstands, if only for a single issue. Of that number, just a couple dozen attained any reputation for literary quality, and fewer than half that many regularly published stories considered to be on a par with those accepted by the prestigious "slick" magazines. The top periodicals in the field - ADVENTURE, ARGOSY, BLUE BOOK, SHORT STORIES, THE POPULAR MAGAZINE, and a few others - were edited and packaged with loving care and consistently reflected the best that rough-paper magazines had to offer. And for decades American readers, ravenous for escapist entertainment, devoured them in weekly or monthly intervals. PRIDE OF THE PULPS contains lengthy, in-depth surveys of the most prestigious all-fiction magazines. Considerably revised and expanded from their original appearances in the award-winning journal BLOOD 'N' THUNDER, these essays reflect scholarly devotion and fannish enthusiasm in equal measure. They chart the evolutions of ADVENTURE, SHORT STORIES, THE POPULAR MAGAZINE, and several other periodicals of comparable quality, noting the memorable authors, stories, and characters that paraded across their woodpulp pages, entertaining readers through two World Wars and a Great Depression. PRIDE OF THE PULPS, profusely illustrated with cover art and interior illustrations from the pulp magazines under consideration, is the first volume in BLOOD 'N' THUNDER PRESENTS, a series of book-length histories of vintage American popular culture as reflected in books, magazines, comic strips, radio dramas, and motion pictures.

The Great All-fiction Magazines

Blood 'n' Thunder Presents Pride of the Pulps

Gary Lovisi

Judge these books by their covers! Get immersed in the definitive visual history of pulp fiction paperbacks from 1940 to 1970. The Art of Pulp Fiction: An Illustrated History of Vintage Paperbacks chronicles the history of pocket-sized paperbound books designed for mass-market consumption, specifically concentrating on the period from 1940 to 1970. These three decades saw paperbacks eclipse cheap pulp magazines and expensive clothbound books as the most popular delivery vehicle for escapist fiction. To catch the eyes of potential buyers they were adorned with covers that were invariably vibrant, frequently garish, and occasionally lurid. Today the early paperbacks--like the earlier pulps, inexpensively produced and considered disposable by casual readers--are treasured collector's items. Award-winning editor Ed Hulse (The Art of the Pulps and The Blood 'n' Thunder Guide to Pulp Fiction) comprehensively covers the pulp-fiction paperback's heyday. Hulse writes the individual chapter introductions and the captions, while a team of genre specialists and art aficionados contribute the special features included in each chapter. These focus on particularly important authors, artists, publishers, and sub-genres. Illustrated with more than 500 memorable covers and original cover paintings. Hulse's extensive captions, meanwhile, offer a running commentary on this significant genre, and also contain many obscure but entertaining factoids. Images used in The Art of Pulp Fiction have been sourced from the largest American paperback collections in private hands, and have been curated with rarity in mind, as well as graphic appeal. Consequently, many covers are reproduced here for the first time since the books were first issued. With an overall Introduction by Richard A. Lupoff, novelist, essayist, pop-culture historian, and author of The Great American Paperback (2001).

Ed Hulse

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