More on sports pulps / Basketball Stories, Winter 1937

I posted the issue of Sport Story last time as an example of the broader Sport genre and next have a couple of single-sport pulps to share. While stories relating to a single sport might seem very confining, I've been surprised at the variety of stories and storytelling within these tales of a single sport.

But an aside, perhaps simply for my own satisfaction, a basic list of sports pulps I made last night. Information gathered from from Bookery's Guide to Pulps.



Except for Sport Story and Fight Stories, it appears this genre of pulp really didn't blossom until the late 30s - very interesting. Many of these titles ran on an annual or semi-annual basis. That Sport Story could have so many weekly issues seems incredible except for the fact it faced little competition for the majority of its run. I'm having trouble making columns appear correctly in this blog format, so I found it easier to post an image. In case any can make use of this list, the spreadsheet version can be had here.

A short list of some better-known authors that worked in these pulps includes the likes of Nelson Bond, Louis L'Amour, Gardner Fox, Jack Kofoed, James Blish, Lester Del Rey, Roe Richmond, Robert E. Howard, Johnston McCulley, W.C. Tuttle, John MacDonald, Walt Coburn, and Robert Leslie Bellem.

But on to today's issue! A fun one-shot from the list above


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I come from the birthplace of Basketball and love to watch the sport, so when I saw this pulp, I could not resist.

Basketball Stories v01n01 (1937-Winter.Fiction House) (DPP).cbr
Get the scan here!

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The lead story is from Nelson Bond, whom many pulp lovers know for his work in Science Fiction though he worked in a number of pulp genres. There's a nice bio page on the author on the always excellent Pulp Rack site here. Here also is a great bibliography page along with photographs, audio, and video at the page for his special collection at the libraries of Marshall University.

This "Gawky for Guard" begins as a girl's quest to save the job of her beloved basketball coach. After seeing the awkward hero of the story on the dance floor, she comes to the conclusion that he is a diamond in the rough and might be able to help the team. She leads him on and manipulates him into joining the team, all the while dating another player on the team who comes to bump heads with Gawky. Can Gawky help bring victory to the basketball team? And what happens when he finds out he's being played by the girl he loves? Good stuff - I like how often there will be a romance in these sports stories that parallels the protagonist's struggle to victory. Apparently, getting your game together extends even into one's love life.

I'll leave you with a few samples...


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I recognize this signature as Bill Ely who went on to a nice career in the comics.

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Next time on volunteer radio, one last post on the sports pulps, a look at the most successful, not to mention my favorite, of all the single-sport titles - Fight Stories!

Sports Pulp / Sport Story October 22, 1929

Before I begin today on a pulp post, I'd like to remind everyone that I'm no expert! I'm a relative newcomer to pulps and pulp collecting and am certainly no authority. There are some nice reference books on pulps, but I daresay the best way to learn about pulps is to buy them and better yet read them. I'd like to stress that less desirable (but still great) pulps can often be had on ebay for the cost of one of today's newstand magazines or even cheaper. A $10 lot of mixed westerns, for example, will provide an enormous amount of reading. Pulps are rare and crumbling, but there is so little demand for most of these magazines that "junk" pulps can be had for cheap. Even the more in-demand pulps (hero pulps, weird menace pulps, weird tales, etc.) can be had for a fraction of the price of comics of a similar vintage.

One of the main attractions of the glory days of the pulps was the diversification. Books like All Story, The Popular Magazine, Munseys, etc. had provided the American reading public a broad variety of stories for decades by the time 20s come along when the pulp market really starts to develop some genre titles. There are some earlier genre entries like Railroad Stories that started in 1906 and Detective Story starts in 1915, there are some romance type of titles, and Western Story begins in 1919, but in the 20s and into the 30s pulp diversification explodes to the point where you get short-runned pulps like Submarine Stories, Firefighters, New York stories, or the most-famous of these strange short runs Zeppelin Stories. Most of these super-specialized titles lasted only a short time, but certainly the main branches of these pulp genres lasted for years and years. Westerns, Romance, Detective, Science Fiction, Adventure were all stalwarts, but many of the smaller genres were popular over many years as well, one of which I'm going to be posting some examples of, the sports pulp.

When I think about classic sports fiction, I guess I'm coming up short. You Know Me, Al by Ring Lardner is the best American sports novel I can think of, but there is no shortage of examples in the modern media to show America's continued interest in sports stories. Friday Night Lights has been running on TV for a good while, and a short list of movies that come to mind would be The Natural (from Malamud's novel), Bull Durham, Any Given Sunday, Rudy, Remember the Titans, Invincible, The Longest Yard as well some less serious fare like Varsity Nights, Major League, Waterboy, etc. Sports are a big part of American life, especially for teenage and college students, and I think a lot of these pulps were aimed at exactly this demographic.

The most successful of the sports pulps was Street & Smith's Sport Story which Bookery's Guide to Pulps (an indispensable tool for the pulp collector, I hope for a new edition sometime soon) tells me ran approximately 425 issues from the September 8th, 1923, issue until it's demise in 1943. A very solid pulp run built on sports fiction, so let's check out an issue shall we?


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Thanks once again to my man McCoy for his edit work on this issue, a marathon scanner that one is. I picked this issue up (besides the fact it was like 2 bucks on ebay) because of the cross-country cover. I ran a bit in school and was curious to see what a story about the sport might hold. I read this issue this week, and, as always, was amazed at the breadth of these little magazines. A lot of entertainment for a dime, I very seldom come away from a pulp regretting the time I've spent with it. Not that long ago, reading was still the American past time, and these books are full of thousands of unique stories. Sure there are formulas and conventions, but there is a sort of quirkiness to many of these pulp stories that I enjoy. I've had people ask me "isn't that stuff just plain awful"? Quite the opposite.

Sure, not every story is a winner (though I've read some uniformly excellent pulps too), but pace and variety and the occasional great story make the pulps fun to read. And you can always just skip to the next story, it's likely to be very different than the one before it.

Sport Story v25n02 (1929-10-22.Street & Smith)(DPP).cbr
Get the scan here

Contents


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Well, my bit of cross country nostalgia paid off, the first story that is in the mode of the cover was my favorite. Cross Country, always a bastard Fall sport. The real men are playing football, the cool dudes are playing soccer, and the runners well they just sort of disappear at practice time. We'd run of in a pack away from the school upon the appointed route and return later in a straggled out line. Some guys liked to run alone and others loaf in packs, this story brought back some of those dynamics.

File this one under B for Bromance. I'm not quite sure what this new term that's slipped into usage means, but I'll go ahead and appropriate it. It's a buddy story about friendship in the comic mode but also heartfelt. A lot of these sports stories will come from the coach's point of view or follow a coach's attempts to bring good chemistry to his team. Sometimes a coach will be in danger of losing his job, other times there will be some prestigious trophy at play, other times some grudge-fraught rivalry will be the motivator. In this story, the coach needs to put a winning team together in order to win a trophy that an alumnus had established to go to a school that wins the league 4 years in a row. Having won 3, the coach now has a team that has lost its best runners to graduation and an underachieving star that is content to run with the pack. Add to the mix a scrappy newcomer with more will than ability who loves to rabbit in front of the pack. Complicating matters is the emergence of a campus group that believes the school is overemphasizing athletics. Once this group gets it's nerdish claws into our scrappy newcomer, the team's new-found chemistry sours just as it is all coming together. Can our heroes get it together and win the coveted Trophy???

I'll go ahead and post this story in it's entirety. Here's "Borrowed Power" by Jackson Scholz, who as it turns out, was quite the athlete himself (his wiki).



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Lol, I'm not sure I'll do that again. I'm not sure how effective a presentation this is for a pulp story and it's a bit of a pain to manipulate and post 15 pages in a row. Viewing in the cbr is easier for all involved, har!

Also a quick synopses for the rest of the stories. The second, Hooley's Unmentionables (a great story name) from Robert H.H. Nichols was another story I enjoyed. Algernon Hooley, gawky and a know it all, is given charge of the football teams back-ups and rejects, an international cast of characters. Can Hooley and his unmentionables come to the rescue in the big game? Sort of a screwball comedy in the vein of the longest yard, making a fighting team out of the underdogs. Third up is One Gentleman's Game by Ralph Henry Barbour whose wiki here shows a long career in sports novels. His tale here most definitely paints an aristocratic world of tennis players, probably more about how a gentleman might act as opposed to a sports thriller. Next up, Cocky Lorem by Laurence Donovan on the art of hockey. And I guess it's always been a smash-mouth game because there's no shortage of violence in this tale. Can team newcomer given the snooty nickname "Cocky" prove his worth to his teammates? The ice will be covered in blood!!! Then, Paddy Moran's Boy by Sam Carson, a tale of how an Irish copper's son comes into his manhood and a peek at jockey culture. Of course there might be a fistfight here or there, those fiesty Irish! Then a short interlude in which the pulp announces the establishment of a Hare and Hounds Club and promises to provide chapters with a carrying bag to play the game. I'm not too familiar with the sport, but the editors promise it is good for young athletes. This is followed by "The Announcer" a listing of upcoming sporting events. I'm not sure how many people actually got their sporting schedule news from this magazine but it does have a national scope, a look at college athletics c. 1930. Next up, a fun one, Honor Bound by William Bruner about the Four Cardinals, a group of West Point cadets from widely separated parts of the U.S. One of the more timid members is thrust into the spotlight as the school's boxing star is accused of thievery. Can our Cardinal defend the honor of West Point? And has the star boxer stolen a gift for his girl?? It looks like this quartet might have been a regular feature as the coming attractions lists a Four Cardinals story in the next issue. That story is followed by the second part of Mystery Ship by John Samson. I didn't read the installment, as it is a serial, always one of the fun but aggravating aspects of collecting pulps - getting the whole story together. Just one serial in this issue, though, I have a feeling this particular pulp liked to be more self-contained than some others. Next up, The Hard Luck King by Thomas Barclay Thomson, a psychological portrait of a football player. Psychology plays a huge role in these stories (as it does in sports themselves) and this one is about how one player gets his groove back. Next, Tri-motor Speed from Raoul Whitfield about a "big plane" competition upon which rests an important manufacturing contract. The last story is Rabbit Rampant about an underdog runner. Can a vicious foul keep our Rabbit from victory? The magazine is concluded with sports news and answers to correspondents.

I probably wont go line by line on every pulp like this, but you see the wide variety of sports and subject matter covered here, a little something for everyone no matter what sport you follow.

And a couple of art samples. I can't say the art for this issue thrilled me too much to be honest. I've found the interior art in the pulps to be of very uneven quality, some of it gorgeous and fine, some pedestrian and uninspired.







Up next time on Darwin Scans, a look at some of the other sports titles and a rare one-shot sports pulp, it'll be a slam dunk...

Also! An invitation. I've never mentioned on my blog an excellent resource for the pulp lover. I post my scans at an excellent yahoo group here. This is a great place to talk about pulp and share pulp scans, really the heart of digital pulp preservation.

The Saturday Evening Post, January 4th 1936 / J.C. Leyendecker New Year's Baby

It's always out with the new and in with the old here at Darwination Scans, but I'll take pause to reflect that it was a very good year on our little blog here and to promise even more discovery and stimulation in the year to come.

It's been a very good year in my family life and a great year for magazine scans, so let's break out the bubbly, baby. I found tonight's magazine in a little antique store a block or two past the end of Boulder, Colorado's downtown while on vacation a Summer or two ago. It was in bad shape and overpriced but magic!


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Who can divine what the future holds, eh? Brilliant composition here - all the wonderful and twisting curves, all the different reflective surfaces, the enchantingly cute baby, the rich detail of a scene full of exotic objects -fantastic!

The New Year's Baby, a long-time American icon, first appeared on the Post's cover in 1906 and it was the last cover Leyendecker would do for the post in 1943. I went looking for a gallery of them all put together, but alas, no blogger has attempted this feat yet. I don't know much about Leyendecker, but I can instantly recognize his distinct style. Certainly a giant in American illustration. For an introduction I'll point you to Jim Vadeboncoeur, Jr.'s fantastic website, BPIB. Here's his page on Leyendecker with bio and many images. There is also a nice gallery here at the excellent American Art Archives site. And if you are interested in the artist, you are in luck, there's a new edition of his work that just came out in 2008 by Laurence and Judy Cutler. My wife got it for me for X-mas, and it looks great. There's a nice review of the book with pictures here.

Thanks again to McCoy for his outstanding restoration work on the cover and for his edit of this magazine. Not to short-shrift, but I posted this one on a whim, so I will quickly post the contents and a handful of samples from this great slick magazine as New Year's Eve awaits...Enjoy and Happy New Year!

The Saturday Evening Post v208n27 (1936-01-04)(Darwination-McCoy).cbr
Get the scan here!

Contents. A fellow pulp scanner pointed out to me that The Hurricane which begins this issue was adapted as a John Ford film, I'll have to track it down. I find the pre-war look at Japan interesting, and there's lots of good fiction in here along with some very nice illustrations and vintage advertising.


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And remember party-goers, in the morning, when you welcome the shining new year still feeling the excesses of the previous, there is a cure!

A Follow-Up / Snap 1941-04 & Jest 1942-07

A Merry Christmas to everyone! Santa brought me mostly books this year, but what more can a guy want? I spent a nice afternoon yesterday thumbing some great new books on J.C. Leyendecker, Norman Saunders, and Robert Maguire, along with the second volume of Bad Mags. For a scanner/collector like me, that means writing down many a scan target, so I'd guess we'll see some blogging on some of these subjects in the year to come.

I promised sports pulp, and indeed I will deliver next time, but for now a quick follow-up to Spot. Sorting my incoming scans folder last night, I came across a couple of scans from my friend McCoy that fill out my ramblings from last time on Spot. So today, I figured I'll post some covers and samples for two other four-lettered magazines from the approximate time period of Spot with a similar format. Trends come and go in the magazine industry, and any successful magazine is bound to have imitators. And that's not to say all the imitators of a trend are of lesser quality or don't bring in fresh approaches within the theme. Or that originators don't in turn incorporate facets of an imitator's magazine. Or that oft-times separate magazines are feeding from same trends in culture and printing technology.

In any case, here's two magazines very much in the vein of Spot, oversized, thin, and jam-packed with photos, all less risque than their predecessors in the girlie pulp and risque humor publications. Maybe the big pages were more in-step with the idea of the pin-up, more suitable for the soldiers headed off to war. Maybe the paper rationing equated to using a format to create the illusion of bigness for a smaller amount of paper. Giant pages but very thin magazines. McCoy tels me he has a couple more magazines that might fall into this genre is his stack, so there are yet more titles of this magazine to explore. But today, for your perusal, the April 1941 issue of Snap and the July 1942 issue of Jest!

Snap v01n05 (1941-04).Get the scan here.

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A pictorial on censored kisses.

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And I'll post in full the pictorial on the dangers of tourist cabins. I got a kick out of this one, where were all the tourist cabins when I was in high school, dammit?!


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and onto...

Jest v01n06 (1942-07). Get the scan here.

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This cover is really something else. I'm not sure if it's a cute cover gone awry or what. A mixture of dirty and weird, I get a sleazy vibe, har har

A recipe for cheesecake, eh?

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Pin-ups and their pets, a peek at a peke?

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Lastly, a war bonds cartoon from Courtney Dunkel. Dunkel worked in some of the earliest comics for Dell in the 20s, did cartoon work for Judge in the 30s, and worked on syndicated strips at various points in his career. His lambiek page is here.


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Once again, thank you McCoy for these scans and all your work in the digital preservation of vintage magazines. You're definitely one of the guys on the scan scene that is making it happen.

Spot, October 1940 / Evolution of the Girlie Magazine

Well I seem to have taken a bit of a breather here from the posting, but let's get back at it, shall we.

Up tonight, the second issue of Spot, a thin but over-sized burlesque magazine from October of 1940. I was just googling to confirm that the publisher listed, Country Press, Inc., is as I suspected a Fawcett operation and came across an article from Time in the same month of publication as our issue tonight. I think it sets the scene wonderfully, check it out:

The Press: Sewage Disposal from Time 1940-10-14

Great stuff! The culprit here is Man to Man, and look at the contributors. In a publicity stunt, a distributor is picked up and hauled in. I get the general feeling that the mid-30s witnessed a general tightening of the public morals. The country had seen what the free-wheelin' living of the 20s had wrought and seems to have tightened up. Catholic groups were pressuring newsstands to clean it up and city ordinances were drafted to prohibit sale or crack down on under the counter sales of spicy materials. But whatever the cause, the mid-late 30s saw the end of the classic girlie pulp. Tattle Tales, Gay Parisienne, Paris Nights, Pep Stories, etc. would all cease publication during this period. I'm not sure what I'll find yet, but I think there are some interesting publications in this period of uncertainty. The girlie pulp had died, but at the same time it was becoming possible to use much more photography cheaply in your publications. The magazines of the 40s are very visual in their exploration of the use of photos. If anything, they are almost overrun with photos. Time, Look, and Pic are the sort of magazine I'm thinking of, big and beautiful to behold. I can see how a publisher of burlesque material could see the potential, and that's where this magazine comes in. Soon magazines like Harrison's Beauty Parade (though lacking nudes) would begin to point to a standard format for men's magazines that Playboy would come to replace as the general standard in men's magazines. Of course, Playboy would draw on the traditions of the humor/cartoon magazines as well which were numerous in the 40s. Anyways, I'm rambling but I suspect there are more magazines like this one from the period. I've been reading Dian Hanson's volumes on the history of Men's Magazines, so I've got more ruminating on this whole area to do before I can get much of a grasp on it. But on to tonight's magazine, Spot! And before I begin I can't forget to thank McCoy for his edit work on tonight's issue. Once again, he's done a splendid job and his help allows me to get many more magazines done than I might otherwise, so it is much appreciated.

A hip title by me, the spot is the place to be.


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Contortionists, whew. I'm not sure if it's sexy or icky, but what a cover. I'm reminded of the strange series Bolles did for Cupid's Capers earlier in the 30s. It makes for an eye-catching cover, I mean, I'd pick it off the rack and check it out for sure.

Stories include A New Twist on Broadway, Big City for a Day, Bathing Suits from a Bottle, Big Game American Style, Carburetor Carnival, Paulette Always Gets Her Man, The Hard Road to Screen Fame, Blow-Ups, Hollywood's Good Girl Lets Go!, A Hot Time in the Old Town, It's Fun to Be Fooled - Even When You're a Magician, It's a Living, Manhattan Beach, and Jump Joint on the Delta, my favorite feature, a ride to the wild side exploring a black juke joint in New Orleans a reflection of race attitudes of the day, fascinated and condescending at the same time.

Spot v01n02 (1940-10.Country Press)(Darwination-McCoy).cbr
Get the scan of the entire magazine here.

The indicia page:

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The editor, Fred Feldkamp, has a wiki here. It's nice to see both house photographers get some time up front like this.

I like the Bathing Suits From a Bottle article. I'll post it in it's entirety below. I especially like the second page where the editor poses the article as a conundrum for the censors. A bit of flaunting the question, I love it.


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Yes, flaunting the naughty laughs, humor and sex make great bedfellows in the magazines. I don't doubt that it's the occasional risque photo like this that sold many a magazine.



There is certainly a voyeuristic element here, traveling from spot to spot. The page on sunbathing almost looks like it was shot from a peeping tom's point of view.


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We're all just tourists through these exotic spots and locales, so maybe it's even safe to explore how the other half lives, eh? Here's the article on New Orleans' Tick Tock Tavern. The language no doubt offends modern-PC sensibilities, but I think it's a lovely pictorial besides its value as a barometer of race perceptions c.1940.


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I'll leave you with my own little moment of zen.



Next up, sports pulp!