There’s a growing interest in magazine collecting but for specific genres and eras. The platform lost much of its shine in the growth of the internet, especially among the general interest and news mags. But attention is returning to particular types of mags and pulps.
It’s a broad field, covering the pulps and mags from the late 19th Century to the 1970s.
Some mags are considered extremely collectable, particularly the “spicy” magazines of the early 20th Century, some of them the precursor to DC Comics and Marvel/Atlas comics. Detective tales from the 1920s to the ‘50s and men’s adventure magazines of the 1960s and ‘70s, also known as men’s sweat mags, were often graced with titillating and powerful — or disturbing — painted artwork on the covers.
However, as a collector, be careful.
It’s a wild market as price guides for most mag genres don’t seem to exist and values are set by what dealers can get for them. Some fans attempt to assemble a collection, but the field is not as organized as comics with Overstreet’s guide or trading cards with Beckett. Magazine lists are often incomplete as numerous publishing houses were pumping out titles of short-lived mags in the war for space on magazine racks and company records are at times spotty.
Hardcore collectors do try to piece together checklists for titles, but there is guesswork involved for some publications. Confusing the collectors’ quests is that there are Canadian editions of U.S. titles printed in the 1940s and ‘50s.
Magazine publishing was a copycat business. Original concept mags were often copied by other publishers to cash in on a trend; low-selling titles morphed into another title and genre else as there were lower legal costs in continuing the sequencing under another title rather than creating a new publication.
Covers were generally sexually charged, and violent (some truly horrific) and stretched any form of credibility. The magazines offered accounts of military daring, zombies, cannibals, aliens, super-sleuths, extraordinary violence and crazed animals attacking humans. Or they’re short stories of a pulp nature of nomadic western gunfighters or super-intelligent crime fighters. It took some time in the publishing world, but sci-fi was born in the Big Bang early days of magazines and pulps, with titles like Thrill Book and Weird Tales.
A key figure among sci-fi magazines was Hugo Gernsbach, whose name inspired the Hugo Awards for science fiction writing. He fathered Modern Electrics in 1908 and his trail of mags led to Amazing Stories, the premier sci-fi mag launched in April 1926 that would inspire many comic creators including Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel and Captain America co-creator Jack Kirby. Most started as bedsheet-sized mags, like Life, but were later reduced to pulp size.
Characters like Buck Rogers and Harry Seldon were born in these sci-fi pulps. Dune was first published in Analog from 1963 to ’65.
Popular Publications was the largest mag and pulp publisher of the era. It was founded in 1930 and its presses put out more than 40 titles monthly. Co-founder Henry Steeger said people wanted escapist stories during the Depression.
“I realized that a great deal of money could be made with that kind of material. It was not long before I was at it, inventing one pulp magazine after another until my firm had originated over 300 of them,” he said.
Titles included Astonishing Stories, Battle Aces, Detective Action, Western Rangers, Argosy and the iconic Black Mask. The company would also acquire all the pulp titles from Smith & Street, with exceptions including The Shadow. Writers in the Popular stable included Ray Bradbury, Edgar Rice Burroughs, John Carroll Daly, Erle Stanley Gardner, Frederick Nebel, Hank Searles, John D. MacDonald and Rex Stout. Some of their works were reprinted into novels.
Many great writers worked in the men’s sweats. Magazine Management Company, the big brother to Atlas/Marvel Comics in the ‘50s and ‘60s, has an extensive history with men’s sweat mags, including titles like Men (not like the current era’s Men), Male and Man’s World. One writer who worked under the pen name Mario Cleri, penned stories for True Action, a magazine focused on adventure stories about the Second World War. His real name was Mario Puzo, the man who would go on to pen The Godfather.
Renowned biographer Dorothy Gallagher said she launched her writing career at Magazine Management’s Screen Stars and Movie World. Her boss was Martin Goodman, the same man in charge of the comics line edited by Stan Lee.
“At Magazine Management, magazines were produced the way Detroit produced cars. I worked on the fan magazine line,” she wrote in a May 31, 1998, essay for The New York Times.
“On the other side of a five-foot partition was the romance-magazine line. And across a corridor were the financial staples of the organization, the men’s magazines — Stag, For Men Only, Male — for which, at one time or another, Mario Puzo, Bruce Jay
Friedman, David Markson, Mickey Spillane and Martin Cruz Smith wrote until they became too exalted and rich to do it anymore.”
She wrote Goodman overworked and underpaid his creative staff, which seemed to be the standard for the publishing industry then.
“For a pittance, Mr. Goodman hired writers with lots of talent and no money. And writers with less talent and even less money. He collected has-beens and soon-to-bes; the desperate, the bitter, the hopeful, the alcoholic, the extremely eccentric, the flotsam of society,” Gallagher said.
Golden Age artists supplemented their incomes by painting covers and drawing for magazines, pulps and later the sweats. Names include Jack Kirby and Alex Schomburg and among the best sci-fi artists was Frank R. Paul. Others include Ray Quigley, Neon Park, whose 1956 cover art for Man’s Life would later inspire musician Frank Zappa’s album cover art Weasels Ripped My Flesh, Vic Prezio, Basil Gogo, and Margaret Brundage, who drew some of the most iconic covers for Weird Tales.
Grading is potentially another issue. Third-party graders are slabbing magazines and pulps and for the most part, collectors should rely on the comic book grading guide. One of the most used is found at https://www.cgccomics.com/grading/grading-scale/.