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...