The Tartan

I’ve really got to stop falling in love with mediums that are entering their death throes. 

While that’s an ominous statement, it’s also just the beginning of a story about fiction, science fiction, and the books that we put on shelves, because for so long, getting a book published was itself a herculean task.

If you were an author with a brilliant idea or two or three and nowhere to go, and none of the funds to simply bribe an editor into printing your idea, you’d have to find a place to go — and those places were the magazines.

See, for a really long time, there were books, but there were also periodicals, the sort of quickly published, moderate quality work that was designed to be off the presses and into the hands of the Mister and Missus by 3 p.m. on a weekday.

It was, in fact, the weeklies and the monthlies in which so much American short fiction was published, because where else would you sell your short story than a strange magazine founded by a crackpot who swore up and down on a ratty copy of a bible that he was a journalist.

While I do absolutely hope to denigrate periodicals with that description, beyond the famous ones, your “North American Reviews” and your “Poetrys”, there were quite a few literary magazines who really only existed as an outlet for new writers to find a platform. They were, of course, cutthroat, because every good ol’ boy in the good ol’ U.S. fully believed himself capable of writing the next American classic. At the same time, it wasn’t to the level that publishing houses or the more prestigious magazines held themselves to. 

More importantly, these magazines, the successors to penny dreadfuls, ragged, uneven, made from wood pulp with the hopes of a gluemaker shoehorned in, were the beacon of innovative and questioning American literature.

See, today, when we think “magazine,” we think of slicks — glossy, nice-looking pieces of media that really only focus on which celebrity gave birth to a UFO and whether the Queen of England is sleeping with the lead singer of Oasis. Slicks were the sort of media that had both complete and utter tabloid trash, but also high-quality art and culture. They were, to some extent, the sort of medium you’d expect someone with qualifications to write in. 

Pulps, on the other hand, were meant to be distributed to people to read on trains and in transit. They were fast, 100-page works that would oftentimes just be collections of short stories. Slicks talked about culture, society, and the world at large. Pulps talked about sex and drugs and weird Sci Fi.

That’s also what made pulps so much fun. You write something nonsensical, stupid, lurid, you make a piece of art and then someone publishes it. It gets distributed. There are people, on long commutes, waiting for their train, reading your work. It was genuinely something incredible.

It was also completely and utterly unprofitable. Digest-size pulps, or pulps in general, while experiencing booms and busts, were never really fated to last. Pulps couldn’t court high society; high society wanted to be published in Vanity Fair, because high society has a reputation and a strong sense of self. Pulp, on the other hand, was looking for the most dramatic artist it could to put a strange picture on the cover to attract a few more eyeballs and stay a bit more profitable.

Pulp also became the sort of literary companion to comics. You’d have adventures, mysteries, strange happenings, strange mythological horror, and things that just couldn’t get published anywhere else.

It was beautiful. It was the frontier of literature, the wild west of writing, a place where anyone could simply create and have their creation read.

We got Tarzan from pulp fiction. We got Cthulhu from pulp fiction. The foundations of speculative horror, science fiction, fantastical adventure stories, were all conceived and communicated through the genre of little ragged penny books sold on the streets.

They never got any more profitable, unfortunately. Most pulp magazines got washed out in the paper rationing of the second World War, and the digest-size works that remained, while peaking in popularity in the second half of the 20th century (Reader’s Digest, anyone?) have rapidly lost ground to just, well, the entire freakin’ internet. It’s really hard to compete with your collection of curated short stories when MUNCH_BOY_FIFTEEN on Ao3 has published at least six stories about your favorite movie characters having graphic sex.

Pulp is dying — and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. But the spirit of pulp, of writing for writing’s sake, of art made to confuse and confound hasn’t gone anywhere. It still exists, from little websites, to odd publications, and it always will, as long as humanity has a drive to tell stories.