The Classic Era of American Pulp Magazines

Rating:
Summary: Eye Candy
Review: Obviously the politically incorrect covers are the first attraction. You can't ignore the cultural significance of the covers and thus, if you are a teacher of semiotics or visual interpretation, I can't think of a richer source. Congrats to the publishers for printing such a glorious book. For those more interested in what's between the covers, Haining gives insightful critical analysis of the different genres. A great gift for anyone; a wonderful coffee table book for yourself. It's worth every penny.

Rating:
Summary: Eye Candy
Review: Obviously the politically incorrect covers are the first attraction. You can't ignore the cultural significance of the covers and thus, if you are a teacher of semiotics or visual interpretation, I can't think of a richer source. Congrats to the publishers for printing such a glorious book. For those more interested in what's between the covers, Haining gives insightful critical analysis of the different genres. A great gift for anyone; a wonderful coffee table book for yourself. It's worth every penny.

Rating:
Summary: Of limited value
Review: Peter Haining has published a huge number of volumes on a variety of topics, which tend to be both well illustrated and very carelessly researched. This latest addition to the stack unfortunately follows that pattern.

First the good stuff: the book offers a large number of well-reproduced covers from a wide variety of pulps. The images are photographs (two are out of focus slightly), and so do not have the problems seen in several similar recent books which had electronically-scanned covers displaying a color palette nothing whatsoever like the actual covers.

Now for the bad part. The text is mainly just a description of particular magazines which happen to be in the author's personal collection. Where the text departs from what is really just a catalog of the collection, to provide background on publishers, specific titles and authors, the material is so riddled with errors as to be of very limited use and reliability. So much of the text is clueless, every reader will have his favorite (and different) gaffe. Mine is the reference (p. 203) to "famous American space artist Chester Bonestall." He's apparently not as famous as I thought!

To summarize the contents: Chapter 1 provides a confused account of the origins and types of pulp magazines. Chapter 2 is devoted to the very-soft-porn pulps usually sold from under the tobacco shop counter. Chapter 3 deals with detective, crime and gangster pulps. Chapter 4 covers the "spicy" pulps and their imitators. Chapter 5 introduces the weird fantasy pulps, of which the best and best known were WEIRD and UNKNOWN. Chapter 6 surveys the "shudder" pulps which featured heavy doses of sadism and torture. Chapter 7 fairly casually dips into the huge sea of science-fiction pulps. Finally, chapter 8 shows us a little bit of the little-known world of British pulps and pulp publishing. (About half the space actually is devoted to paperbacks rather than pulps.) Notable complete omissions from the book are the most popular pulp genre, westerns (perhaps half of all pulp titles at peak), and the justice-figure pulps such as THE SHADOW, DOC SAVAGE and the SPIDER, which are the best remembered pulps today. Also largely ignored are the general fiction titles, such as BLUE BOOK, ARGOSY and ADVENTURE. With such omissions, the present book cannot be considered very valuable even as a pictoral survey of the pulp era.

Buy it for the cover reproductions and you won't be too disappointed. But if you try to read the text, you're in for dismay and frustration.

Rating:
Summary: Of limited value
Review: Peter Haining has published a huge number of volumes on a variety of topics, which tend to be both well illustrated and very carelessly researched. This latest addition to the stack unfortunately follows that pattern.

First the good stuff: the book offers a large number of well-reproduced covers from a wide variety of pulps. The images are photographs (two are out of focus slightly), and so do not have the problems seen in several similar recent books which had electronically-scanned covers displaying a color palette nothing whatsoever like the actual covers.

Now for the bad part. The text is mainly just a description of particular magazines which happen to be in the author's personal collection. Where the text departs from what is really just a catalog of the collection, to provide background on publishers, specific titles and authors, the material is so riddled with errors as to be of very limited use and reliability. So much of the text is clueless, every reader will have his favorite (and different) gaffe. Mine is the reference (p. 203) to "famous American space artist Chester Bonestall." He's apparently not as famous as I thought!

To summarize the contents: Chapter 1 provides a confused account of the origins and types of pulp magazines. Chapter 2 is devoted to the very-soft-porn pulps usually sold from under the tobacco shop counter. Chapter 3 deals with detective, crime and gangster pulps. Chapter 4 covers the "spicy" pulps and their imitators. Chapter 5 introduces the weird fantasy pulps, of which the best and best known were WEIRD and UNKNOWN. Chapter 6 surveys the "shudder" pulps which featured heavy doses of sadism and torture. Chapter 7 fairly casually dips into the huge sea of science-fiction pulps. Finally, chapter 8 shows us a little bit of the little-known world of British pulps and pulp publishing. (About half the space actually is devoted to paperbacks rather than pulps.) Notable complete omissions from the book are the most popular pulp genre, westerns (perhaps half of all pulp titles at peak), and the justice-figure pulps such as THE SHADOW, DOC SAVAGE and the SPIDER, which are the best remembered pulps today. Also largely ignored are the general fiction titles, such as BLUE BOOK, ARGOSY and ADVENTURE. With such omissions, the present book cannot be considered very valuable even as a pictoral survey of the pulp era.

Buy it for the cover reproductions and you won't be too disappointed. But if you try to read the text, you're in for dismay and frustration.

Rating:
Summary: What the glory years of pulp magazines had to offer
Review: The colorfully covered, cheaply printed pulp magazine of the 1920s and 30s great out of the 19th-century dime novel and served as the forerunner of the comic books and paperback novels of today. In its heyday, pulp magazines were a staple of popular culture that offered every genre of readership the thrills, adventures, and entertainments they craved -- often to the dismay of parents, teachers, and clergy! Virtually creating the now popular literary genres as science fiction and the hard-boiled private eye mystery, these magazines were the incubators of such American literary talents as Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, Dashiell Hammett, and a legion of others. An outstanding recommendation for personal, academic, and community library collections, The Classic Era Of American Pulp Magazines tells the complete story of these colorful pulps and those that wrote and published them, with a wealth of colorful cover art giving today's readers an accurate sense and taste of what the glory years of pulp magazines had to offer their enthusiastic readers.