Happy Valentine's / Love Revels v01n01 December 1933

Cheers and Happy Valentine's to all you girlie pulp lovers out there.  Here's a scan of the first issue of an intriguing love pulp from December of 1933.  Bottoms up!

Cover artist unknown.  Later cover artists in the four issue run are R.A. Burley and Zoe Mozert.

Full scan available here, and the issue can be read online or downloaded in alternate formats from the Internet Archive here.

This issue marks something of a return of Frank Armer to the girlie pulps who was a pioneer of the Artists and Models and girlie pulp genres creating titles like Pep! (Stories) and Spicy Stories.  Suffering losses in the stock market, printer/partner Harry Donenfeld took over his books out of printing debt (a tactic he used with other players in the pulp game, most notably Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson).  Donenfeld owned this title, too, which aimed to appeal to the romance crowd as well as the girlie pulp lovers.  Doug Ellis' Uncovered notes that material from this issue later appears in ashcans for the Snappy line (Snappy Detective/Adventure/Mystery).  Frank Armer is the editor of Love Revels.  I've written about Armer here at Darwination Scans before, but I'd refer those interested to a longer essay on the girlie pulps at pulpmags.org here.

Love Revels ran for only four issues, the final issue being April 1934.

As one of the lone champions of the actual content of the girlie pulps versus just their cover art (and likely one of the lone readers, heh heh), a friend recently asked me if there were any truly great stories from these pulps.   There are, but the funny thing is,  like with most pulp, I sort of read pulp stories and forget them, though I have started to take note of any "classic" stories in case I ever want to put a collection together in print in celebration of these underappreciated stories.  This issue doesn't have any stories that make the cut, but that doesn't mean I didn't enjoy it.  Like a box of grocery story valentine's chocolates, these short entries come in different flavors, perhaps none too refined, and, ala Forrest Gump, when you start a girlie pulp story, you never quite know what you're going to get.  If you're a frequent reader of my blog, you'll notice I try not to spoil any stories while still pointing out the fun ones when "thumbing through" and issue in review.

The inner cover.  I've often pointed out here that the readership of the girlie pulps was split between men and women.  The modern perception with the saucy covers and inclusion of nude photography (though this title has none) is that the girlie pulps were male-oriented.  The letter pages (which often offered inter-gender pen pals where romance pulps would not), the advertising, and the nature of the fiction all point towards female readership as well.  Ribald romantic comedy and a bit of naughty humor are enjoyed by all, even if a lady in the 30s might blush if granny caught her reading a girlie pulp.

Is the inner cover aimed at a male audience?  Hardly - and body image concerns are nothing new even if the contraptions, medicines, and trends in what's attractive do change over time -  the "perfolastic girdle," money back if you do not like

 

But the next page, the first pulp page, which sex is this aimed at?  Could be either, eh?  But don't get edgy when your missus comes looking to up the life insurance benefit, gentlemen, she's not poisoning your tea or anything...

 

Contents, no author names jump out at me here, though a couple of these writers do have a good number of pulp credits.  The use of throwaway pseudonyms was very common in the genre, though we've managed to associate some of the more prolific girlie pulp scribes with their more famous mainstream monikers.

 

The first issue mission statement, always revealing in a magazine, as they tend to lay out goals and intentions and to invite the reader into the pow-wow:

 I think what you're getting here is a pitch at both girlie pulp and love pulp readers.  Romance pulps like Love Story and All-Story Love were very successful, but you also see more and more smaller titles popping out of the woodwork as well as a push to "modernize" the genre, maybe push the prim and proper boundaries as possible.  Here a nod to "life as it IS" and "romances of youth told in the modern manner...entertaining."  Young lovers are drinking, making merry, struggling with the effort to stay chaste and perhaps not always succeeding.  And, yet, the boundaries, though pushed at and teased, are mostly still respected.  These tales are "clean and wholesome" even if "red-blooded."  Changing romances for changing times.  And maybe this tension was even more in play in the mid-30s that had moved on from the jazz-age in a return to  more traditional moires, but still the heart (and body) want what they want -

The first story, A Date for Tonight, teases this tension.  Martin Cavendish, hardworking and traditional New Yorker, is ordered by his doctor to take a vacation for the good of his nerves in sunny Florida.  A stranger in a strange land, Martin marvels as the bronzed and lightly clothed Floridians, "They weren't convalescents like himself; this was their normal and accustomed manner of living.  A gay, carefree lot of pagan sun worshippers!"  Almost immediately, Martin falls under the spell of young Patty and the Florida night.  Love is in the air, Martin's ginger ale is replaced by stronger spirits, there's dancing and cavorting, and before you know it, puritanical Martin's blacked out.  Imagine his fright on waking -

Artist unknown.

Has Martin dishonored this young lass?  Does she even care? She seems none too concerned about such weighty matters. Does she make a good cup of coffee?  A fun opener that sets a whimsical tone for the rest of the issue.

Fangs regards a pair of longtime friends reunited in Mexico.  Tall and Blonde ladies' man Ed Huntley hasn't seen his friend Walter Winslow in years.  In the meantime, Walter's seen hard times but has found fortune in Mexico as a coral snake farmer as well as marital bliss with his beautiful Mexican bride, Conchita.  Huntley always wooed the ladies back in college, and Walter seems to think Conchita has taken a liking to his blonde friend.  Who is snaking who here as the fangs come out?

Between story pages, there are illustrations and jokes, Bo and Flo, adorable:

Jealousy is a one pager wherein a husband has tracked his wife to an unknown apartment and confronts the man within after she leaves.  Good for a guffaw or few.

Going Up from Robert Clairborne Pitzer is far and above the oddest entry in this issue.  It involves the young Mary Kelly who has been orphaned by  her mother and given by the county to be raised by the unkindly Kirschwalder clan and forced into a sort of servitude on the farm, spreading manure and weeding the crops.  She's been arranged to marry the son of the Kirschwalders and to take the family name yet manages to keep fine spirits and a rebellious attitude in her secret dancing in the pasture, prancing about as god made her.  But Kirschwalders and visitors from on high catch her in the act and violent passions are roused. How will Mary get out of this dire predicament?

A Grand Place for a Honeymoon is from Esther Schwartz who is perhaps the most accomplished writer of romances in the issue. Esther appeared regularly in the romance pulps in titles like Breezy Stories, All-Story Love, and Love Story Magazine, and she has a story in all four issues of Love Revels.  A Grand Place for a Honeymon begins with an unnamed lass walking alone along a road in the Adirondacks as the sun is setting and a heavy blizzard is about to fall.  She refuses a ride from a group of "rather forbidding-looking" men and seems to realize she is in a horrible situation as a second car with alone gentlemen approaches, and a man implores her to hop in.  His behavior grows rather impertinent from her on out, as he takes her to a nearby cabin with only a single bed, a grand place for a honeymoon he tells her, as the snows come down, no doubt trapping them together for days.  

Keepsake A short and saucy tale of a trusting but clever husband.

Pajamas on Venus, from Nigel (also Don?) Stuart, is one of better stories in the issue and is set at Snowden college where the young rapscallion Grant Walker is trying to make it with his sweetie, Barbara.   She insists that they wait for any hi-jinks until Grant has graduated meeting the terms for a fifty grand inheritance.  

Please, baby, baby, please...

 

Complicating matters is the fact that Dean Manwaring (a horrible prude that kicks any slightly unvirtuous women out of the school but who nonetheless keeps a nude venus in his  garden) is out to keep Grant from graduation.  Involving a wicked bootlegger, poor decisions, police pursuit and a dance marathon.

Late Laughter - A wicked married woman chases a faithfully married man at a Summer colony.  Defenses crumble as one learns from another the nature of love.

The Masque - "a flirt may tempt but does not always conquer" - After a masquerade at an inn, Mel's had it up to here with his betrothed, Janice.  He's given her a ring, yet she gives him no honey.  During a quarrel, she gives the ring back.  That night, cocktails are prepared, poured, and imbibed by a the group of young merry makers.  Intrigue and partner swapping are afoot, and the catty and sensuous Peg is out to score with Mel.  What beds will all of these young wake up in?  I liked this one.

 

The Pest - Shirley, "one of those rarities : a beautiful girl with brains," just can't get it through the thick head of Claude that she's not interested in him despite his wealth.  Claude won't take no for an answer, so Shirley sets out to let Claude know she's not the nice girl he thinks he's after:

Shirley, you bad girl, you (art by Max Plaisted)

The best laid plans of mice and men -

Lastly, maybe the funniest story in the issue, Wise and Otherwise, is from Adelaide Thomas who I have to speculate might just be Adelaide Humphries, a romance author I've been investigating but who I haven't written about here on my blog yet.  This is the only Fictionmags entry from an Adelaide Thomas, but the writing style and pulp neighborhood certainly line up with Adelaide Humphries (Rowe), so I consider it a strong possibility.  But more on Adelaide Humphries later, I promise - Wise and Otherwise involves Adele Allison who has just gotten a fancy fur coat from a man other than her husband, the cheap bastard.  She must simply have this coat and out in the open, too, so her sugar daddy, who cares not about the conventions of marriage, comes up with a simple plan involving her husband and a found pawn ticket.  Hilarity ensues.

Ah, a fun girlie pulp, love and lust, the turning of tables, transgression and forgiveness.  Happy Valentine's to all you lovers out there. Be good to your sweetie, and she'll be good to you.  On the way out - a couple more vintage advertisements.  We began this post with a girdle for her. I told you the girlie pulps are equal opportunity - a girdle for him?

Don't eat all those chocolates at once!

I admit I'm a last minute shopper, perhaps some diamonds for my honey on Valentines, cheap, too -

We do our part, yes we do.

Hmm, lucky to have a chocolate and roses type of gal...

Note: Sharper eyes may recognize that this doesn't look like one of my usual scans, and it isn't.  This issue was scanned with an overhead scanner from a university collection.  I've left the front cover a bit rougher than I usually might to match the look of the rest of the issue (and who doesn't love a newsstand or under the counter star stamp *swoon*).  I've worked with images from overhead scanners before, and the images from this machine are similar in quality to what can be achieved with the overheads at the Library of Congress.  The scans are sharp, and the process is easier on a delicate book, but there's a trade-off in color quality and uneven lighting gradients as well as some photo-realistic distortions having to do with page curvature and perspective.  All in all, though, I'm pleased with the results and even enjoy the "realness" of an overhead scan (even if a flatbed scan is much preferred for archival purposes).  I plan on pulling some more treasures from this collection when circumstances and proximity allow -

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...

 

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.

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.