Liberty 1936-04-04 (Canadian Edition) / Walter Baumhofer

Back again tonight with a second issue of Liberty which just happens to be the first slick magazine I had the pleasure to scan. Looking at the scan nearly 3 years later, I'm still pleased with it. The text might be a little blocky from too much contrast, and I make my pages wider these days, but the scan is a beauty - really just a testament to this fantastic magazine. It is truly mind-boggling that all this goodness was delivered to your door for a mere nickel.

After my last post, I discovered the NYT article that seems to point to the coming of a Liberty archive online (there's a slideshow of covers accompanying the article ). The wiki says the magazine is bound for the Google treatment (which would be a very nice injection of actual content into the web) and the official website draws correlations between current events and history out of Liberty. I don't doubt that as these issues become viewable by readers the world over that much of the forgotten fiction and history might be rejuvenated by our modern cinema as film and documentary. For certain, historians will have an excellent resource for understanding the times from within the times, history in context...But on to tonight's issue!


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This issue is very appealing to me because it contains the conclusion of crime classic Double Indemnity but just as much for this fantastic cover and artwork from Walter Baumhofer. Look at this character from the wilds of the Afghan border, a fierce flame burns here. Baumhofer is well-known among pulp fans, he began his career painting covers for Clayton and Hersey for titles like Gangland Stories, Courtroom Stories, Riders of the Range, Speakeasy Stories and Western Trails. His career begins to take off when he catches the editors' eyes at Street & Smith and soon he's pumping out many covers a month. He only painted covers for Doc Savage for 3 years, but there's no doubt that he is the classic Doc Savage artist, capturing the look and the feel of the biggest hero in pulp beside The Shadow. In the mid-30s he would also do some excellent work for Popular Publications on titles like Dime Mystery and Adventure. About this time he breaks into the big leagues, the slicks, and I think it's when he was in top form. You can find a little more biographical information on Baumhofer on David Saunder's excellent Field Guide To Wild American Pulp Artists here and a nice digital gallery including some of Baumhofer's illustration work outside of the pulps at the American Art Archives site here. For more examples of Baumhofer's paintings I'd point you to the John Gunnison's recent Adventure House book on Baumhofer. I feel the book might have done well to include more larger reproductions (beautifully reproduced from Baumhofer's stash of file proofs) instead of going with so many thumbnails (cough - bloggers pay heed, thumbnails do not do justice to cover art). There is also little text to accompany the art, but it's hard to complain too much because the covers are really the thing.

But back to our issue, a couple more Baumhofer pieces. His splash for the cover story

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and the fantastic 2 page spread that follows. Love it!

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Get the scan here. I note that this is the Canadian edition with different ads, an editorial from the Canadian editor instead of MacFadden, and so forth. Another scanner inserted the American pages which can be had here.

Contents, at the back of the issue, oddly convenient that way.

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And some further sampleage. Kicking off the issue - forget O.J., the Lindbergh kidnapping led to the real trial of the century. America could not get enough, and it is still lead material here in 1936. I'll go ahead and post the whole entry because it's so short.


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And I couldn't post this issue without a word on Double Indemnity, the splash for the final installment by James Montgomery Flagg who we discussed back in a post for Leslie's Illustrated Weekly in 1917. And I had better issue a spoiler alert, please if you haven't read this and might have an interest, do not begin reading at the conclusion :)


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Most definitely a classic from James M. Cain and a classic finale. I like Flagg's rendition. I believe this was the first noir/crime book I ever read, included as a lark by an English professor in my final year as an undergraduate. Years of education in American literature, and I'd never encountered one of our richest veins. I remember seeking out The Postman Always Rings Twice and moving on to Chandler and Hammett then to Jim Thompson, Chester Himes, James Ellroy, and so on. I still find myself gravitating to the detective pulps when reading for pleasure. So a big thanks to that teacher for pointing me down the dark alley of crime ;)

A couple of more splashes, Frank Swain illustrates Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr.'s "Rich Man's Son":


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And Edgar McGraw illustrates Betty Wallace's "No Romance in Flying, Eh?"

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I hope you've enjoyed this look at these issues of Liberty, truly a classic American magazine. If you seek some out for your own collection, you will not be disappointed. I've been reading a biography of Bernarr MacFadden and will return to the subject, but regarding some other of his myriad publications...

So I'm ready to attack my next major project here, the birth of the girlie pulp (a series of posts on the magazines and zeitgeist that preceded and birthed the classic girlie pulp as well as an exploration of what defines the girlie pulp and some early examples) but might post a few other things on the way. I've just laid hands on a few examples of a publication that I want to include as a preface to this girlie material (La Vie Parisienne), and while I'm preparing the scans I hope to make more-regular short posts in an attempt to make up for the recent absence...