When you hear the words, Pulp Fiction, most people immediately think of the iconic Quentin Tarantino movie of the same name. But to a collector, Pulp Fiction means something entirely different.
Not to be confused with Pulp Magazines or the Dime Novel from the late part of the 19th century, the Pulp Fiction era began in the 1930s and ran its course through to the 50s when the paperback novel took over. These were the days before bookshops like Indigo and Barnes & Noble, and long before TV was invented. In many respects, Pulp Fiction was mainstream entertainment that appealed to the masses. And it only cost a quarter (sixpence if you’re in England).
Pulp Fiction Genres
Pulp Fiction includes a very broad category of collectable paperbacks. There’s American Pulp, UK Pulp, Canadian Pulp, not to mention dozens of different genres and subgenres, including:
- Action/Adventure
- Romance
- Hard-Boiled Detectives, Mysteries, Whodunnits
- Gangster & Hot Dames
- Fantasy
- Westerns
- Sports
- Aviation
- Espionage
- War
- Armed Services Editions
- Crime Noir
- Gothic Horror, Occult, Weird Menace
- Humour
- Lesbian
- Science Fiction
- Spicy/Saucy
- Juvenile Delinquents
- Beatnik
- Railroad Stories
Named for the cheap paper pulp these paperbacks were printed on, Pulp Fiction stories were short, easy-to-read and disposable. Moreover, they fit in your pocket. No coincidence then, that the first publisher to release Pulp Fiction paperbacks to the masses was called Pocket Books.
The Birth of Pocket Books
Launched on June 19, 1939 by Robert de Graff, the success of Pocket Books lay in the mass marketing and distribution methods. Bookstores were rare. At the time, there were only 2,800 bookstores across the US and these were found in big city centres. According to an article in The New Yorker, "more than a hundred and eighty million books were printed in the United States in 1939." If Graff was to make a profit, he’d have to get his pocket books into as many other retail spots as possible. He targeted newsstands, cigar stores, drugstores, lunch counters, train and bus stations and subway vending machines.
De Graff’s venture proved to be a success from the first day, when 110 books sold in less than 24 hours at just one cigar stand in New York City. It took only two months for de Graff to expand into other cities, including Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland. In that time, 325,000 Pulp Fiction copies were bought by an adoring public in the US.
Pulp Fiction Competitors
Meanwhile, over in England, the founder of Penguin books, Allen Lane, got wind of de Graff’s Pulp Fiction success and immediately set up a publishing press in the States that he called American Penguin, with titles from authors such as Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and Hank Janson (aka Stephen Frances). Other publishers popped up across the US:
- 1941: Avon
- 1942: Popular Library
- 1943: Dell
- 1945: Bantam
- 1948: New American Library (NAL) took over from American Penguin and published Signet (fiction) and Mentor (nonfiction) and created Mickey Spillane
- 1950: Gold Medal Books under Fawcett publishing
- And many more
In Canada, Harlequin, Ricochet Books and the News Stand Library became the first to produce Pulp Fiction paperbacks. More than 900 editions of Canadian pulp from the collection of poet, publisher and bookseller, Nelson Ball, can be found in the William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections, McMaster University Library.
Demand for Pulp Fiction was so high that print runs reached a volume never seen by publishers before. A typical initial press run for Pocket Books was 100,000 minimum, for Signet 200,000 copies and for Gold Medal Books 300,000 copies.The paperback era was well underway and outselling hardcover titles like The Sun Also Rises by Earnest Hemingway and The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, which sold just over 5,000 and 20,000 copies. By the mid-1940s, more than 100 million Pulp Fiction editions were sold in the US and UK every year.
So how did they sell so many copies?
Salacious cover art, racy titles and an affordable price tag turned these low-brow paperbacks into a pop culture phenomenon. In fact, many critics and scholars have written on the subject and the effect Pulp Fiction has had on society, such as Janice Radway, Lawrence Rainey, Evan Brier, Gregory Barnhisel, Loren Glass, and Paula Rabinowitz in her book American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street.
Pulp Fiction was pure escapism with fast-paced, urban dialogue and graphic cover art. To keep up with the demand and to keep coming up with fresh titles, publishers often hired a team of hack writers who collectively wrote under a pseudonym, such as the New English Library’s Richard Allen and Mick Norman. Other writers got their start writing Pulp Fiction and used a pseudonym to protect their literary integrity. Some of these authors include William S. Burroughs (who wrote pulp as William Lee), Jack Kerouac and Philip K Dick.
Pulp Fiction was everywhere. It was not uncommon to see people reading pulps on their lunch hour, standing in line, or waiting for a bus or a train. These cheap paperbacks fit neatly into your pocket and were the modern-day equivalent of the cell phone – portable entertainment. Stories typically featured Vaudevillian-type villains, damsels (or dames) in distress, the stereo-typical sex kitten, the action-adventure hero and of course, the hard-boiled detective.
Pulp Fiction Cover Art
Today the cover art is just as irresistible as it was to the readers back in the day. In fact, the cover art was so important to the narrative that it often inspired the stories within. The cover art came first, because it was the key to Pulp Fiction’s mass market appeal. To narrow down such a broad field, collectors often focus on a particular artist or collect only editions from a certain year or ones that feature women smoking or someone holding a claw hammer or women dressed in red, for example. The options are as endless as the genres.
One collector living in the UK collects only American vintage 1952 Pulp Fiction paperbacks. His pulp collection amounts to more than 7,000 editions, with some worth more than £500 each. He told the Guardian, "Some artwork is amazing and everything was hand-painted. Value is determined by author, publisher and cover artist."
Some of the better-known and most collectible cover artists include:
Walter Baumhofer, Earle K. Bergey, Margaret Brundage, Edd Cartier, Virgil Finlay, Reginald Heade, Frank R. Paul, Norman Saunders, Emmett Watson, Nick Eggenhofer, Hugh J. Ward, George Rozen and Rudolph Belarski.
But not everyone was enamoured by the lurid artwork on the covers of these Pulp Fiction paperbacks. Some publishers even ended up in court, charged with obscenity. One example involves the British pulp writer Darcy Glinto (aka Harold Kelly) and his cover art for first editions of Lady - Don't Turn Over and Snow Vogue. Considered ‘obscene’ by London’s Old Bailey in 1942, Glinto and the publishers were fined £200 (approximately £10,000 today). These and other titles went up for auction at Bonhams annual Fine Books, Manuscripts and Photographs sale (June 24, 2021) and sold for £ 2,422 (US$ 3,301).
At the time, large numbers of pulp titles were destroyed due to tough obscenity laws and this only makes them more collectible and valuable today. For example, William Lee’s (aka William S. Burroughs) pulp story entitled Junkie, published by Digit in the UK, showed an illustration of a blonde woman sticking a syringe full of heroin into her bare thigh. This edition was destroyed in large numbers and very few remain in circulation today. In 2005, this pulp edition of Junkie was valued at £7,000. A signed 1957 edition of the same title but with a different cover went up for auction in 2014 at the annual New York Antiquarian Book Fair and was valued at US$15,000.
It is rumoured that Penguin’s Allen Lane detested the lurid cover art so much, he’d have bonfires of American Penguin pulp at his own warehouses. In 1948, he’d had enough and he severed ties with his American division. This is when NAL took up the reins. The well-known orange and white Penguin paperback covers of today show you just how much Lane hated the tawdry cover art of Pulp Fiction.
But it was the secret to Pulp Fiction’s success and the only way publishers knew how to grab the attention of passersby during a difficult, penny-pinching and tumultuous time of history.