Friday, February 7, 2025

Ransom!: The Story of a Lost Child n01 1933 / The Pulp Serial, Cincinnati Style - Andries Nielen

This is a mysterious little publication that's been sitting on my scan pile forever.  The cursory investigation I've done into its origins took longer than scanning and edit work -

 

Cover artist unknown. 

Full scan, Ransom! - Grace Allen Hardy n01 (1933.Nielen) (Darwin).cbr, available here.

Or you can read online or download in .pdf from the Internet Archive here.

I've seen this lone issue of an apparent series many times over the years. The colorful cover sparks the imagination - the tabloid background, a movie star, a romance with a sheik and a tuxedo-ed beau, a mysterious kidnapping of a babe in white (this being the year after the Lindbergh kidnapping).

The nature of the publication itself poses curiosities as well.  Slightly wider than a normal digest and a very thin 36 pages, this is an oddball format to say the least.  10 cents isn't a ridiculous price point, but it is high in the depths of the Depression when that same dime might fetch you a glamorous Hollywood magazine or a thick love pulp.  Blank inner covers?  No advertising? What's going on here? 

But before getting to the answers I dug up on the publisher and the nature of the publication, some sample images.

The first printed page (on a pulp paper, I left the scan a little "browner" than I tend to, but I wanted to stress the physical characteristics)

 


A fitting first page, "And now I want the whole story..."  Illustrator unknown, initials W.G., one of two artists on the title (from what I can tell).

The flip, a very sparse indicia/copyright page, but it tells us what we need to know for a bit later in this post. 

Followed by the cast and titillating details of the epic story to come...


Janelle looks a little saucy, willfully smoking cigarettes in front of her overbearing father...

 

From high society into a whole world of adventure and drama, and of course the issue finishes on a stunning cliffhanger...

The back cover.  So many questions to be answered!  So much adventure to come!  And a nice clue about what's going on with this serial and publisher...

 

Signed, THE PUBLISHERS.  The Nielen Publishing Company in Cincinnati points to one Andries Nielen, a Dutch immigrant who started a successful business importing tea and expanded into the realm of publishing romance pulp serials and selling household goods. After his retirement (though it seems he still had some hand in the business), Mr. Nielen traveled the world taking photos, many of which were sold as postcards printed by his company.  Here's Mr. and Mrs. Nielen at their home in Los Angeles in 1938 (from an eBay photo postcard):


 The flipside, as his postcards had short bits of wisdom from Nielen or bits of wisdom he'd gathered.

 

It was from a blog entry on postcard History by Dolores Rowe that I was able to find some information on Nielen and his company which you can find here.

And the Cincinnati Library has a nice digital collection of 190 of his photographs/postcards which you can peruse here (and which lists the sayings on the backs of many of the cards).

A search at Worthpoint (a site that catalogs past eBay sales, incredibly helpful to a magazine detective/indexer like me, even without a subscription) turned up further issues of Ransom! which indeed runs through a whopping 110 issues.  I'd note that finding other issues besides #1 (and even finding #1s is tricky enough) on the Nielen serials is very difficult, but they are out there:

 

All the issues besides the first are printed with a monotone cover, and the earlier ones seem slightly easier to find.  Why the first issue is more common exists in greater numbers is apparent when you look at the information on the bottom of the back cover:

The color #1s are a sample copy, special with the color cover and meant to entice.  A door to door salesman (my guess here) would follow these samples, hoping to find buyers for the rest of the serial.  Judging from the scant sales I've found of more lower issues than latter, I'm thinking the rest of the serial might have been sold in installments of say ten issues.  The fact that Nielen sold household goods might point to him already having a network of salesmen and that he could sell multiple wares with his door to door network.  Another clue about this likely being the case is that all of the serials I've been able to find are geared towards housewives (seduction narratives/romances) who were the likely customer base of the door to door approach.

Here's a different serial from 1932 with a similar look, The Crossroads of Love: Sylvia Crane's Search for Happiness by Cora Lane Sherman:

 

It looks like the same cover artist as Ransom! to me.  The back cover with the same "Representative will call" notation:


 Again, the later issues are with monotone covers:

 

And a couple of other serials from Nielen.  Barred from Paradise: The Dramatic Love Story of Gloria Dean by Cora Lane Sherman from 1930:

Or from 1928, The Great Revelation :The Tragedy of an Unwanted Bride, again by Cora Lane Sherman:

 

Are there other titles out there?  How long did he publish pulp serials?  Right now, I'm looking at a range of 1928-1933, but there could be more.  Are there western or crime serials?

In any case, an interesting model for selling pulp and a new regional publisher I'll be keeping an eye out for (and there's a minor history of regional magazine publishers in Ohio that maybe we'll expand on in later posts on other magazines).

See you next time.  A representative will be knocking...


One more oddity, an alternate cover?!  Slightly more salacious with the menacing native and babe on a platter.  This variant seems to be even more rare than the edition I've scanned here...


 

Thursday, January 30, 2025

New York Life v01n01, June 1933 / Meeting Hitler in the Streets

Here's a remarkable and very scarce publication I visited in a university collection recently that I'm thrilled to be able to share:

Cover as well as the other 7 pages are up at Flickr, a very easy way to read this oversized tabloid.

Full scan available for download here, also readable online and available in other formats at the Internet Archive here.

Part of Joey Burten's mid 30s comeback, this publication is far different than I'd imagined what I'd find. Burten is listed as publisher, but New York Life was distributed by Independent News (Harry Donenfeld, Jack Liebowitz, and Paul Sampliner) who I assume were the money men and de facto actual publishers (and there were men behind these men as well).  Donenfeld had made his initial mark in the girlie pulps but when Eastern Distributing was forced into bankruptcy in 1932, Independent rose from the ashes.  Soon Spicy Detective would be a hit, and, in 1938, the real goldmine, man in tights, Superman, would come along and DC comics would ride strongly into the media conglomeration future to where it remains today -

But here we are in 1933, and Germany is *rapidly* transforming under Hitler, and who is ringing the alarm bell in the states?  This cadre of rapscallions. This first issue of New York Life is a full newspaper-sized 8 page tabloid chronicling the incredibly fast shift of Germany to Nazi state and disappearance of and barbarity towards the Jews.  Nationalism, racism, and playing to the grievances of "the injured and insulted masses" is playing into a totalitarian's hands.  Pulp and comic publishers are recognized for comics like Lev Gleason's Daredevil Battles Hitler or Martin Goodman's Captain America smacking Der Fuhrer the on cover of the first issue leading up to World War II, but here's fellow publishers a 8 full years earlier directly calling for a boycott of German goods.  Is there some sensationalistic tabloid angle at play? Sure, but this is muckraking activism attempting to make America aware of what is happening to the Jews in Germany and advocating for a boycott of German goods as the shit is hitting the fan.
 
The issue begins - Hitler's promise - a revival of German values and the liquidation of 'Marxist' enemies:




Despite having long been residents of Germany and active in civil, commercial, and community life, Jews are no longer welcome under the new regime.


But Burten not only presages the coming Holocaust, he also sees the coming war and what Hitler's first move will be.  Militarism, nationalism, and a blind fervor is leading to the inevitable here in 1933.  Germany's coming for Austria and the rest of Europe, and we already know it:
 

The construction of new camps is underway.  Dachau -

Officers in churches, desecration of holy sanctuary

 
Tony Sarr cartoon (Burten himself?  A strong possibility)

No shoppers allowed during the Nazi boycott of Woolworth's.  These gentlemen are singing songs while they discourage any would-be shoppers.

There's all sorts of other details in here.  Bits on Einstein's daughters left behind.  Erich Maria Remarque as an enemy of the state for his realistic writings on the horrors of war in All Quiet on the Western  Front.  A knowing indifference to the plight of the Jews from business competitors happy to gobble their share of the market.  Officers expelling Jews to the ghetto mainly out of interest for stealing their worldly possessions. The argument by Germany that American cries of racism be rejected out of hand as hypocrisy over Jim Crow and the Asian Exclusion Act.

The issue ends with a bold proclamation of action, no doubt over-estimating the awareness or will to act in the American public:

 

What America knew and when we knew it is troubling to the national conscience.  

The standard historical take (and no doubt true in some cases) is that Americans only knew when concentration camps were discovered towards the end of the war.  But in my years of digging in pulp and newsstand publications, you find many American publishers were exposing atrocities and American conspirators with the Nazis long before we joined the battle.  Ken Burns three part documentary on the subject, The U.S. and the Holocaust, is a very informative look at the subject.  


And, lest I be too indirect, could it happen here?  De-humanization of our fellow man?  America Uber Alles? The American Continent as Manifest Destiny? A demolishing of Democracy's guardrails? Fuck, I hope not.  History can turn on a dime, but good people have often let evil flourish under the guise of something else.

Monday, January 13, 2025

10-Story Book, February 1928 - The South Sea Island and Tropical Number / Thornton Jenkins Hains

An odd follow-up tonight to the Christmas edition of the Wild West Weekly from 1936 I shared last time here on Darwination Scans, perhaps, but that's how it happens sometimes in our periodical explorations.  I present the February 1928 edition of 10-Story Book.  For those of us buried in snow and Winter blues, how about a brief sojourn in hotter climes?

image at Flickr, model unknown

10-Story Book v28n02 (1928-02) (Darwination).cbr

Full high-resolution scan available for download here, or you can read it online or find a .pdf format at the Internet Archive here.

Cover design and layout is from Charles Oglesby Longabaugh who I know very little about, but from the sporadic credits I've seen, it's his distinctive lettering and design that make the covers of 10-Story Book so alluring.  Always a mix of red, whites, blacks, and occasionally greens and almost invariably featuring a bit of cheesecake, you know you've got something spicy as soon as you have your hands on this little magazine out of Chicago.  "A Magazine for Iconoclasts," 10-Story Book was published almost continuously on a monthly basis from 1901 to early 1940 and was edited by Harry Stephen Keeler from about 1919 through the rest of the magazine's existence.  Keeler, an odd duck to say the least, is known by some for his detective fiction and by others for his science fiction, but I know him mainly as a magazine editor.  His wife, Hazel Goodwin Keeler, whose work often appears embedded in his novels, was similarly entwined in the production of the magazine, and a couple of her illustrations feature within this issue. The formula for the magazine was fairly steady - a number of illustrated shorter stories were mixed in with copious amounts of "girl photos" and cartoons.  Some of the fiction was reprint material, but much was original features from up and coming authors, down and out authors, or authors who just didn't know what to do with a particularly odd piece of fiction.  Most often an issue has a theme like "The Weird Story Number" or "The Crook Story Number" or "The Artists' Number," and there were a good number of "Big Photos Numbers" as well with the promise of girl photos (often taken from French postcards) always at the forefront.  

Before we go exploring the issue, let me go right to why I scanned it.  When writing my last post on Paul Power's Pulp Writer, I noticed in his early bibliography at Fictionmags an appearance in 10-Story Book and immediately recognized the cover from my collection (it's an absolutely striking cover), so I pulled it from the vault right away for scanning.  In Powers' memoir he talks about being paid (on publication) by the fledgling (and later legendary) Weird Tales for his earliest fiction work.  At the time, he'd been doing mostly joke and gag writing but hoping to break into the fiction game.  I'd hope to find an early piece of Paul Powers fiction in this 10-Story, but here's what I found, "Jones Tells of His Trip to Mexico":

Illustrated by Jo Metzer.  Sometimes comedy gets lost in translation.  Here translation is supposed to be the comedy.  A gag concept that could be used for an artist drawing would pay more than a straight joke, so hopefully Powers made a few bucks on this one. No worries, as his he'd hit paydirt as a writer for Street & Smith westerns soon enough.

On to the rest of the issue, starting with the inner cover. 10-Story Book lets us know that this issue is so daring that the regular brand of raciness can't even raise an eyebrow where we're going, South Seas, ahoy!

Russian dancer Elizaveta "Lila" Nikolska as God made her.  Nudity is apparently the norm in the South Seas, but 10-Story Book readers interest might be quickly piqued.  Lila on the cover of a French mag a year earlier where they experimented with color a bit before we did in the states as far as the risque photo covers go.  Paris Plaisirs June 1927.  Design by French great Georges Leonnec:

Our issue's contents, a lovely page, likely laid out by Longabagh.  A typical jazz-age hand-drawn layout, an exercise in silhouette and symmetry:

Image at Flickr

So, the allure of the South Seas...  10-Story Book would have at least a few of these tropical and island numbers.  For starters, there's the obvious curiosity that island girls live topless.  Then there's the literary tradition of Melville's Typee or Jack London's South Sea Tales or Henry de Vere Stacpoole's The Blue Lagoon where life on these islands stands in idyllic contrast to the rigidity and constant labor of life in the first world.  Also, there's a greater liberty given nudity when there's an anthropological context (ala bare-breasted women in grandad's National Geographics).  

I make an effort here to shy away from trigger warnings regarding racism and stereotypes in hundred year old magazines, but in this issue you do see the word nigger bandied about casually and a sort of slack-jawed gawking at the savages.  It's not as simple as that, though, as there's also jealousy and admiration for those that are able to live apart from the vagaries and economies of the so-called civilized world.  Notably, a lot of the space that would typically go to girlie photos in a 10-Story Book are in this issue devoted to pictures of natives. Oddly, any native scene seems to do, as there are photos from South America and Africa and elsewhere that don't fit with the theme of island life.  Forgive, though, as in the 20s magazines and newspapers were still one of the few ways an American might get a glimpse of the wider world.

So, as is often the case when I scan and read a magazine, one story leads to another, and for this mag, it's the opener, "Nuki-Heva Head" by Captain T. Jenkins Hains, that sent me down a rabbit hole.  The splash page:

Nuki-Hiva Head is a middling tale in a humorous vein about the Whaler William Lee's struggle to retain its crew in the Marquesas.  An ode to the beauty of the island girls, men leave the Whaler to get goods ashore and never come back.  Even the Captain falls for the lure of the islands and its berries, and the narrating first mate is forced to pilot the ship back to civilization with only his island bride.  There's plenty of nautical lingo involved in the feat of only two people piloting a large whaler and the feel of a tall tale being told.  The decision of most of the crew to abandon ship is not made to seem unreasonable.  It's no mystery why a whaler wouldn't actually often get too close to some of these islands :D

But it's not this story that sucked me in here, it's the story of the author, Thornton Jenkins Hains. Hains began his literary career in the Argosy but quickly moved to higher-end magazines and wrote sea tales for Harper's, McClure's, The Metropolitan, Cosmopolitan, and The Century as well as being published in hardcover. But, come 1906, Hains must have caught the eye of Charles Agnew MacLean at Street & Smith under whose editorship The Popular Magazine had exploded in circulation and mass appeal.  MacLean's philosophy on simple and direct language and a good story as the most compelling feature of literature made The Popular almost instantly successful.  His nose for talent led to the discovery of the likes of Zane Grey, H.G. Wells, Jack London, Mary Rinehart Roberts, Octavus Ray Cohen and others. I mean to write about The Popular some other time, as I view its success and expansion as a eureka(!) moment for pulp in the earliest part of the century and have found some great material in issues I've scanned, but, for now, I'll just share here the first issue that Hains appears in, February 1906, which features his tale "The Dutch Ghost":

 

Color scan here, black and white version here, or read online or download at the IA here.  A hearty cheer to a great patron of the pulps, Laris Bullock, for donating this issue along with an entire box of Populars to me for scanning through Pulpscans, just a small portion of the the books he's donated to the cause of digital preservation (in addition to sharing his knowledge of the stories and authors).  

As The Popular grew in circulation, it offered steady and high-paying work to favored authors, and Hains must have fit this category, as audiences seemed to take a liking to his sea stories and recurring characters like The South Sea Traders, Bahama Bill, and Hammerhead Jones.  Starting with the above issue, Hains would appear almost every single month in The Popular into late 1908 at which point Hains would become involved in a murder trial that would be splashed across front pages of newspapers across the nation and something of a turning point in matrimonial murder cases as well as uses of the insanity defense. 

Thornton Jenkins Hains, though successful as a writer who imagined himself in mold of Conrad and Melville, was the black sheep of the family.  His father, Peter Conover Hains, was at West Point with George Armstrong Custer and ordered the first artillery shot at the Battle of Bull Run, the first major battle in the Civil War.  His real claim to fame is an engineer, as he designed the Tidal Basin in Washington, D.C., eliminating drainage and odor problems in the Capitol's marshlands after floods.  He also lobbied and participated in the design of the Panama Canal over the proposed canal in Nicaragua.  Later he'd become the only officer to serve in both The Civil War and WWI.  Thornton's younger brother, Peter, was a successful officer in the Army.  While Peter was serving abroad, Thornton wrote that his young bride, Claudia Libbey, was engaging in salacious behavior.

When Peter returned, his wife denied any dalliances, but Peter kept a close eye on her over the next two years becoming convinced she was having an affair with his good friend, William Annis who was either the Editor or Advertising Director of the Burr-McIntosh Monthly (A gorgeous magazine that I can't believe I don't own any issues of).  

On August 15, 1909, accompanied by Thornton, Peter went to Annis' yacht club on the day of a ladies' regatta.  As Annis' got out of his boat having won the race, Peter emptied his eight shot revolver into Annis' chest at point-blank range as Thornton stood guard with his own gun drawn.

The San Francisco Call of August 17, 1908 describes the scene:

A cold-blooded murder in broad daylight at the yacht club, egad, and became known in the papers as the Hains-Annis Case or simply "The Regatta Murder." Another sinister facet is that Thornton Hains had been involved in the killing years prior as a young man of his best friend, also at point blank with a pistol. Again from the San Francisco Call August 17:

 

After this first murder, Thornton was ostracized and left Baltimore for Florida and locations and journeys unknown around the globe for a number of years until his re-emergence as a writer years later.

When the brothers faced trial for the Regatta Murder their defense was well-funded by their father.  For Peter, the defense was "Dementia Americana" aka "the unwritten law" that a husband might be driven for a short time out of his mind and driven to kill his wife's lover.   Despite having no real legal grounds, this had long been a traditional defense in this type of murder.  More unconventional was Thornton's defense, "folie à deux," wherein one man's insanity becomes shared by another.  During months at trial, various psychiatric experts of varying qualifications testified against each other about the merits of these arguments.  In the end, Peter was found guilty of Manslaughter while Thornton was found not guilty of the same.  Peter was given eight years, but in two years was pardoned by the governor.

Following the verdict, there was an outcry against "the unwritten law" and a firming of what psychiatric defenses should be allowed in court and what constitutes an expert in the field.  Thornton Jenkins Hains faced no punishment but a tarnished reputation.  His stories would no longer appear in the slicks.  In the pulps, he would shift to the alias Mayn Clew Garnett to escape public notice and continued to appear in The Popular, Top-Notch, Short Stories, and other pulp magazines.

Thornton Hain's next bit of notoriety would come on the heels of the Titanic disaster, as his story as M.C. Garnett in the May 1 1912 edition of The Popular Magazine, "The White Ghost of Disaster," which was had already been printed when the Titanic sank on April 12th.  "The White Ghost of Disaster" was hailed as eerily prophetic, about a giant ocean liner with a thousand souls aboard that strikes an iceberg.  Some newspapers even reprinted the story in its entirety.  The issue of The Popular (scanned by a fellow pulp scanner):

Cover by Hibberd Van Buren Kline.  The full issue and story readable at the Internet Archive here.

An excellent article in The Smithsonian Magazine explores the differences between the story and the Titanic's demise and brings up some further juicy possibilities about the Regatta Murders.  Peter's wife suggests on the stand that the affair was fabricated and that Thornton had vowed revenge when she turned down his own advances.  There's also the fact that it turns out Peter had fathered a child a year before the trial with the family maid.  

Sometime around 1914, there was a letter-writing campaign by those who'd figured out that Hains was being published as M.C. Garnett demanding that the pulp publishers cease publishing these stories.  In a Brooklyn Daily Eagle article from September 27, 1914, Hains tells a reporter that he can no longer publish and is living aboard a boat with his wife and five kids living as a fisherman and driftwood gatherer.  Ironically, he's petitioning the police that he needs the right to bear his pistol to ward off gangs but that he is "not a gun-toter" and does not "believe in guns."  Wild stuff.

But, indeed, he must have made his living by some other means than his typewriter for a number of years, as he doesn't show up back in print until 1922 in Street & Smith's Sea Stories  (the first issue, no less). However, that story is a reprint of earlier Popular work as are some of his other stories, so figuring just when he was able to submit new stories to the pulps might take some further discerning.  In any case, an unexpected jaunt into pulp author biography here - I'll definitely take notice when I see stories from Jenkins (or Garnett) in the future.

But back to our 10-Story Book and who's the savage, anyways, if not our lead author?

A rather soulful and distinguished looking islander? The magazine's caption would josh you that he's a cannibal (tongue-in-cheek as the assertion may be):

Are these Brazilians savage?  A curiosity to the Chicagoan reader, at least, maybe it's the 10-Story Book readers that have gone native -

This being Prohibition, you know there's a longing for a little jungle juice.  A modern Paul Revere (cartoon by Preston Moses):

A splash page from the wife of the editor, Hazel Goodwin Keeler, for Halcyon (my favorite story in the issue) in which love conquers any culture clash:


 Image at Flickr

All this high art doesn't pay the rent, though, what type of advertisers might frequent a mag such as this? 

Girl pictures.  Rehab self-help. Loaded dice. Body image issues. Sexual insecurities.  Not much different than the ads during football today :D  Who are the savages anyways, eh? I need some of those loaded dice for my next craps game.  I'll catch all you magazine loving cannibals next time.


Sunday, December 29, 2024

Wild West Weekly, December 26 1936 / Paul Powers, Pulp Writer

 

Cover image at Flickr.

 Wild West Weekly v107 n04 (1936-12-26.Street & Smith) (missing pages) (Darwin).cbr

Full scan here. Or you can read it at the Internet Archive and download alternate formats here.

Howdy, pardners.  It's been a while.  And here I am with a late Christmas present, consider it one of those parcels that didn't quite make it your doorstep by the big day. It's a present not only from yours truly but from the good people at pulpscans, as this book is part of one of the *many* group buys we've put together there where members throw in a little cash to buy books that the scanners digitize for posterity, community radio, yo.  For pulp lovers without a collection and who can't scan, contributing to these buys is a perfect way to do your part in preserving pulp.

The artist here is the most excellent Robert G. Harris, who began his career in mostly western pulps and who later "graduated" to the slicks working in magazines like Cosmopolitan, Redbook, Liberty, and The Saturday Evening Post.  I've worked the cover image from what I assume to be the artist's copy of the proof that sold along with the original painting back in 2020.

Though my parcel is arriving late, I've got to credit the first story in this issue for first giving this old grinch the first glimpse of the Christmas Spirit this year, always desperately needed, as I hate crowds, commerce, and a whole month of Christmas tunes -humbug! :D.  

Credited to Ward M. Stevens, the story is written by Paul Powers, a stalwart of Wild West Weekly in the 30s, featuring his outlaw with a heart of gold, Sonny Tabor.

Illustration likely by Lorence Bjorkland.

The Tabor stories are in the tradition of Billy the Kid in a way, usually set in ranges of Arizona with Tabor as a beloved outlaw. But Sonny is no Billy (who'd backshoot you in a second). He has a heart of gold, and his efforts to do good are what propels the story even as the law invariably closes in behind.  I don't want to give any specifics of the story away (read it! read the other stories, too!), but I'll just say I found it very sweet and only had to suspend disbelief just a wee bit here and there :D I can't recall if I've written about pulp westerns here before or not, but I'll just say I thoroughly recommend their reading.  There's so many sub-genres in any given issue that keep it interesting - from the historical to the mythical to the comedic to straight blood and thunder.  Is it the nuanced modern Western we might be used to or the anti-hero of Clint Eastwood type? Not too often, but there's more poetry than you might imagine, and they're incredibly fun to read (all those millions upon millions upon millions of magazines sold, one dime after another - the people were pleased).  I've scanned a a couple of other 3W issues in recent weeks (one includes a story from another Powers' other well-known hero, Kid Wolf) which you can get to by clicking the link to my Internet Archive shelf (still slowly populating it with older scans) at the right.  But right now I want to pivot to a short book review, as I've read (or actually re-read) this tome since reading Law Guns:

I can't recall where I bought the book (though I do have a signed copy), but it is still in stock in places and leave it you to find at the bookseller of your choice if you're interested.  This is a most excellent pulp writer's memoir, a different individual experience but just as informative as Frank Gruber's Pulp Jungle, the most oft-cited example of the form.  

Powers is a fellow Kansan, from where us conceited easterners would call Western Kansas, a town I had to look up, though I've no doubt driven through the vicinity, Little River, Kansas, north of Hutchinson (my wife's hometown) and between McPherson and Lyons.  Those of us from Kansas know a catalog of small and tiny towns, but I wasn't familiar with this one :D 

The book follows his granddaughter Laurie's journey in learning about the world of pulp and Paul's life and work and includes his memoir from 1943 which is probably fair to assess as near the end of the successful portion of his career in the pulps which mirrored the success and downturn of the western titles of his main employer, Street & Smith.  Powers ponders his childhood as the son of successful doctor, who he seems to have always remained in the shadow of in his own mind at least, who was poor student with middling ambition.  Along the way, Powers does discover that he wants to be a magazine writer, very much so, and sets about it haphazardly starting as a joke or gag writer for magazines like Judge or Life and lesser magazines at a dollar or few a joke.  There was no instruction manual for breaking into the pulps (and I suspect Pulp Writer is meant to be as such) and he meets rejection slip after rejection slip as he's married and has his first child.  Forced into working in the salt mines (yep, we've got plenty of salt mines in Kansas) for subsistence, Powers is seemingly saved by the acceptance of his first story for Weird Tales, Monsters of the Pit, which would grace the cover in June of 1925.

 


Cover by Andrew Brosnatch.  What a funky phenomenon this cover is.  Heritage calls it classic, and it is indeed iconic in a fashion (like his cover for The Wicked Flea issue), but I daresay it's a bit primitive or even hideous :D

Powers would sell more stories to Weird Tales (half-cent payment up printing, if I recall correctly), a story to Action Stories, a story to 10-Story Book (an issue I happen to have and will add to the scan pile), but only really struck constant work in the fiction department (prior most of his earnings had come from joke sales) when he sold to editor Ronald Oliphant at Wild West Weekly in late 1928.  Once he figured out what Oliphant wanted exactly in stories for the magazine, he was able to sell as much as he could write (which was a lot).  Spurred by his success (and very high income for the day, including during the depths of the depression), Powers and his second wife were able to pick up and move as the whim hit (and it hit Powers often), exploring the locales that he'd use as fuel for his stories. Powers gives a great explanation as to what the pulps were and has a simultaneous pride in the fact that he was able to please so many mixed with the notion he might be doing more with his talent in terms of depth and poetry, a feeling common to many a commercial artist.  Alas, the demon rum might have kept Powers from a longer career, and he spent his later decades as a bookseller/book picker living a shell of his former life.  

But, you know, these hundreds of stories he left behind remain good reading, and the arc of an artist's private life doesn't diminish the goldmine of works they leave behind.

Anyways, an excellent memoir by Paul and an excellent examination by Laurie.  Her next book on pulp, on Love Story editor Daisy Bacon, which I'm sure to write about someday is - well - let's just say for now I consider it one of best books on pulp ever written, and Pulp Writer is a worthy warm-up.

One last excerpt from the 1936 Wild West Weekly Christmas edition, a heart-warming poem of yore, Santa Claus Stops A Lynchin' by Arthur R. Rafter:

 

Back sooner than later, pardners, so many pulps and mags to get to as well as some long-standing subjects...