If these yarns were trash, then they were the best trash.
They were trash for connoisseurs of trash.
― Don Hutchison
Frank Munsey dreamed big.
In less than two months he launched Golden Argosy, a monthly boys' magazine he conceived as a replacement for the "dime novels" so popular at the time.
But Munsey had to scramble for readers—boys worked long and hard to spare a dime in the 1880s; and many couldn't—and after four years found himself going broke.
Rather than give up his dream, Munsey repackaged Golden Argosy.
His decision gave birth to an industry.
Most importantly, Munsey expanded the magazine's audience to include adult men.
Argosy became a runaway hit, attracting over 500,000 monthly readers.
Appearing in droves, copycats soon launched competing pulps—by the hundreds.
Within a few years, they crowded the racks of drugstores, newsstands, tobacco shops and confectioneries nationwide.
Their titles included such gems as Black Mask, Marvel, Nick Carter, Clues, Dime Detective, Nickle Western, Fight Stories, Railroad Stories, Pirate Stories, Saucy Stories, Pep Stories, Spicy Adventure, Weird Tales, Wild West Weekly, Dare-Devil Aces and The Mysterious Wu Fang.
About 1,300 of them wrote short stories for two cents a word, in order to feed men's insatiable demand for escape.
While most pulp-fiction writers are forgotten today, some are well remembered—even lionized.
A paper shortage during World War II, the debut of the 25-cent "pocketbook," and the proliferation of movies, radio programs, and TV shows displaced the pulps.
Those that didn't abandoned fiction altogether, moving into the category of "men's magazines" and devoting their lurid pages to topics like Nazi sadists, serial killers, Bigfoot, and the Bermuda Triangle.
I still remember seeing those throwbacks in the confectioner's stores in the early 1960s, on the racks above the comic books and the copies of Mad.
By then, the age of the pulps was over.
"The age of the pulp magazine was the last in which youngsters were forced to be literate," pulp-fiction writer Isaac Asimov lamented.