Pulps & Magazines

We buy and sell pulp magazines and comic books

PULPS

Collecting Pulp Magazines has been our hobby for over 40 years. Our main interest is 'Pulp' magazines, published between 1923 through about 1954. Many people confuse these magazines with comic books because of the similarity of covers and titles. However, there are fundamental differences between the two. Comic books are primarily pictorial stories with captions. Pulp magazines are text, with an occasional illustration.

If you have any pulp magazines to sell, I am always in the market to purchase collections, large and small. We also buy Vintage Paperback Book Collections.

The name "pulp" comes from the cheap wood pulp paper on which such magazines were printed. Magazines printed on better paper and usually offering family-oriented content were often called "glossies" or "slicks". Pulps were the successor to the "penny dreadful", "dime novels", and short fiction magazines of the nineteenth century. Although many respected writers wrote for pulps, the magazines are perhaps best remembered for their lurid and exploitative stories, and for their similarly sensational cover art. Modern superhero comic books are sometimes considered descendants of "hero pulps"; pulp magazines often featured illustrated novel-length stories of heroic characters such as The Shadow, Doc Savage, and the Phantom Detective. At their peak of popularity in the 1920s and 1930s, the most successful pulps could sell up to one million copies per issue. Among the best-known titles of this period were Adventure, Amazing Stories, Black Mask, Dime Detective, Flying Aces, Horror Stories, Marvel Tales, Oriental Stories, Planet Stories, Spicy Detective, Startling Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories, Unknown and Weird Tales.