Darwination

My head hurts, grades in.

v01n01 of Hi-Jinks, a jazz age humor digest out of St. Paul published and edited by Guy F. Humphreys. A sad victim of sun-fading, but a rare bird. McCoy's edit on the scan https://www.mediafire.com/file_premium/4n4acm3b3bfxgsa/Hi-Jinks_v01n01_%281925-06.Humphreys%29%28D%26M%29.cbr/file https://archive.org/details/hi-jinks-v-01n-01-1925-06.-humphreys-d-m

Awesome, thanks, RM! Love the little format. Looks like Iger Studio to me with the panel layouts and cheesecake poses. The back cover won't bowl anybody over, but I think it's really neat in a "low-key" fashion to use a term my kid's toss around. Same bar as the front, but you've got a table of merry-makers flirting, a chick checking out the jukebox, and a dark door leading into the forbidden love lair of the comic EDIT: And a little Tonya Harding action in that last story, ha!

Damnit, Jay. Now you have me looking in (sporadic) copyright registration records and tracking down covers for a humor digest, hoping for more Cole Palace Sales Co. listed in the indicias but one issue copyrighted to Swank Magazine Co. - Not the Victor Fox Swank but maybe the second owner that published Swank as a digest (in the meaning of a reader's digest not humor digest like this one) for men If there's any more Cole it's gotta be issue three which is the only issue I could not find an image for. Yours is issue four from 1946 which, amazingly, Heritage sold a copy of in 2020. Scarce title. Yours has the deeper color Not to muddy the pristine Cole waters, but one other good cover in the series, dunno the artist. First ish, but for some reason labelled volume 2, May 1944 One of those deals where you hold out hope there's an unknown Cole on the third issue.

Good round for me, ALL SKILL Almost went 3.5 instead of 3 on the Startling, got held back by the corner piece, big staple tear and mainly the back cover. Who cares about a back cover anyways - 3.5 ain't ridiculous considering the overall appeal. Hit the bullseye on the Battlefront going hard on the spine split and whatever that funky big tear is by the staple per the grading criteria I was looking at. Who cares about the overall beauty of the book, eh? Wandered off from the wiser crowd again on the Journey into fear and went all the way up to 5.5, a little too high - 5 seems right.

Wesley Neff did a number of these "big head" covers for Adventure Probably best remembered for this style on his covers on an offshoot of Esquire, Ken. Tears of a clown -

Oh, yeah! Grades in.

Small amount of glue on the cover getting the purple again and seeming very common. Just cause it's on the outside? Not that I can see where it is from the auction pic. The real question is how much the purple is gonna ding the sales price which is hard to tell because I'm not getting a feeling yet for how the grading/boxing is affecting the sales prices either (besides them being generally jacked)

I was thinking the same thing, but I'm 49 and close enough That said, I see interest in the general subject of pulp fiction (if not pulps/pbs in particular) from at least some of the younger crowd that I'd think would translate. I don't hit the LCS very much any more but am pretty amazed at the diversity when I do. Very different from years gone by. Ofc, the owners still look at me funny when I say the word "pulps," so that hasn't changed -

I'll hop in here, Bob. No doubt, the paperback thread here is a special one with lots of interest and enthusiasm - it's been an eye-opener for me in both the material and the level of engagement. My thing is magazines (and I sure like comics, too), but the paperbacks have some special things going for them. Let me just break it down real simple like from a newbie's perspective. The material: The art kind of starts where the golden age of illustration leaves off. A lot of painterly talent that didn't necessarily have a place to go ended up in the paperback market. Sure, much of it is the type of talent that was in the pulps or would have been in the pulps, but there's masters in the paperbacks as well. Particularly of interest to me is the intersection of all this - the companies that printed pulps (and other magazines) also printed comics when those got popular. Those same companies pivoted to paperbacks and digests when that market exploded and the pulps and comics faded out. Goodman, Fawcett, Lev Gleason, Ace, and many others were in all these areas. There's plenty of artists (take Norman Saunders for instance) that did work in magazines, pulps, comics, and paperbacks. And the subject matter I love comics, but this isn't kid stuff, we're talking man-sized thrills. Women, sex, violence, and gritty sleaze. And sci-fi and westerns and spy books and war books, etc. Plus, I'm a reader. I love short stories, but the novel is king, and that's what most pbs are. Book lovers realize quickly how cool the vintage pbs are. Collectible upside: You can collect by author. You can collect by artist. You can collect by publisher or line. They've got numbers like comics. I'm no completist but see people here putting together runs just like comics collectors do or just scooping up "keys," etc. And the price is right - ten bucks, twenty bucks, thirty bucks. Sure, the scarcest or neatest ones are more, but it's not like comics or even pulps for that matter. Some books are ghosty, but lots of books are more common. Finding them "in grade" may be harder to do, but for a lot of the mass market books it seems possible, and to be blunt I don't even want a pb in grade if I'm gonna read it, or just like comics, a mid grade might be the best of both worlds. Collectible downside: Yep, I'm going there. Affordability as a downside? Not in my world, but does that keep them from being "the next big thing?" Maybe. A weird double-edged effect. Size? (and this may just be me) - I like bigger art. Comics are awesome, but pulps and magazines are even more awesome when it comes to the size of cover art. Of course pbs are still beautiful, and the small size means they don't take up as much room for the space conscious. Not to mention a book on a bookshelf is a lot more easy to access than hauling out a box and flipping for the issue you're looking for. On the other hand pbs can mean a lot of wasted space on deeper or taller shelves. I imagine a lot of people have special shelves for their pbs. My non-vintage pbs get kept on shelves in the attic while my hardcovers get the prime real estate in the A/C, but that's not the case with the vintage ones I'm picking up. PBs are fragile? Yeah, kind of. It's not like a brittle ish comic you think is gonna detach from the staples or split at the spine with any handling, but you can lay a comic on the desk and flip pages, it lies flat. When I read a pb, it's likely gonna get manhandled. You hold that sucker for hours as you flip from one page to the next. I'm sure there's a learning curve on being gentle, but I don't like to even think about such things while I'm reading a good book. And some of em are just gonna fall apart. You figure out quickly the binding on a cheaply made or mistreated book is gonna split during reading, sort of a so-be-it situation. Really, I can make peace with that and just read em. Lastly, small print. I think they're perfect handling size in many ways, but the print is smaller than a full size modern printing or hardcover. Old people may need to break out their readers But, damn, they're cool. I love the boardie sales - Randall's this weekend was a stunner. It's all new to me, and I don't know what treasure is gonna pop up next which is part of the fun. I don't see myself going nuts with em but I definitely can see picking up a couple a month, the best covers or just as a neat alternative to a modern printing on a book I want to read. It might be a little bit more dough, but you get a much cooler package. As for finding them in the wild? I'm giving up on that mess. There's more of a chance of finding pbs at antique malls or flea markets than magazines (which are usually misshapen from being displayed floppy and upright for decades) but I almost never find good ones or nice copies and the price is usually not great. Just like with comics, I'm tired of thumbing through all the drek. Point me to the box of golden age or a special shelf with the good stuff, please, and I'm happy to pay a fair price (and find flippers much easier that way, too). I prolly should have skipped the coke at dinner, this is gonna be tl;dr for most, what else is new

I've met worse. I hate to rib a gearhead, but I'd have lost the over/under I had in my head (even knowing that you got that collector jones). There are worse things in this world to spend money on than books and guitars

Not good enough, I need an approximate number so I can rate you on the gearhead scale

Ah, that's a new one to me! According to dimenovels.org it refers to the fact that they were published to be sold at railway stations or on board trains. The magazine's been dying a slow death for a good while now, but one of the last vestiges of the well-stocked newsstand remains the airport. Of course, I put a beater pulp or two in my travel bag (and my phone is loaded with pulp). You get funny looks when you pull out a crumbling and hopefully not too smelly pulp western for the plane ride

Super fun sale (even though I walked with nada). Some fast guns in here, holy cow.

Of uncertain authorship, purportedly a Day Keene short expanded by Gil Brewer to novel length. Meant as a collaboration but released only under Keene's name. Haven't read it yet (but it's on the list, love Keene), so I couldn't weigh in.

From my collection. Thought it was a dime, but apparently it cost a quarter. Copyright date shows 1906 but actual date is 1914-195. The South's got our detectives, too. Err, published in Massachusetts. House ad on the back page, as Hood's Home Library was printed by a firm more remembered for their "patent medicines" but who also printed calendars, greeting cards, posters and who knows what else. Name still visible on the smoke stack. http://www.cliffhoyt.com/cihood.htm Like many of these more famous dimes, this was reprinted a *number* of times This looks to be the 1906 Ogilvie printing the copyright date refers to: But hell if it was reprinted in a lot of other libraries as well. I count inclusion in 12 different Library Series. Original source? Good old Street & Smith's publication, the New York Weekly, where they got their start peddling pulp - the paper they slowly bought from owner Amos Williamson. Francis Smith himself wrote a hell of a lot of pulp for the paper. Chapter 1, A killer scan of the first entry there (and a couple others) linked as well as publication history for Macon Moore, Southern Detective here: https://dimenovels.org/Item/2378/Show I thought Judson R. Taylor might have been Smith himself, but it's actually a pseudonym for Harlan Page Halsey who later did Old Sleuth: http://gadetection.pbworks.com/w/page/7930720/Halsey%2C Harlan Page Pull the string on one of these dimes and you never know where it'll go Darwination, Pulp Detective The story papers were kind of the birth of pulp. When newspapers started to offer all sorts of product for an even lower price, S&S figured out they could package old serials in nickels and dimes or offer a tremendous amount of fiction for a dime in magazines like Ainslee's or The Popular Magazine. Happen to be working on an early Popular this morning (before I got derailed as I often do nyuk nyuk) from a group buy for the pulpscans group, 1904-04, the sixth issue. Some experimentation going on on the earlier covers with colorized photos: It'll look *a little* different by the time I'm done with it. The Popular *truly* takes off eight months later after S&S manages to secure H. Rider Haggard's Ayesha, a gothic-fantasy more in the vein of how most of us think about pulp.

Yeah, ol' Horatio 'bootstraps' Alger wrote a few words, too, and didn't end up too much better off. Ormond and the rest of the Smith clan did O.K., though. Not that there wasn't a lot of hard work and genius going on there, too.

Recently read The Fiction Factory on the first hundred years of Street & Smith. Some fascinating backstory on some of the characters/writers/house names in the story papers, nickels, dimes, and pulps. Regarding Nicholas Carter, Frederick Dey took over the character invented by the son of founder Francis Smith and John Coryell, and the headline in the NYT on his death says it all: "Creator of Nick Carter Kills Himself: Penniless After Writing 40,000,000 Words" Many other writers wrote under the pen name as well

Bullseyed the first. Full Grade down on the Detective. I'm blaming Point Five for the soft blacks on the first picture Suzie, half point down. 2.5, eh? I was wobbling on the 1.8. Give the cutie her due, though, she can tune my piano anytime. tough business, this.

Saw this yesterday while I was upping a 1956 gentleman's magazine (21, a wild one, mix of burlesque and sort of world erotica, Gene Bilbrew art, and other stuff) to the IA yesterday. A little spread of girlie pulp covers in funky colorization. A sort "hey look what they were doing 20 years ago, we aren't the first naughty mag" sort of deal. Nice picks, though, Enoch Bolles' Salome is flat out classic. in this one: https://archive.org/details/21-n-04-1956.-monogram-dom McCoy's edit there. Bolles' Salome, watch out boys when you catch that look, goodness gracious - (not my copy, apparently it came to eBay once but somehow I missed the auction) Only recently figured out that the Worth Carnahan cover I posted a couple pages back is Salome: which I figured out after seeing this one (I'm obviously not up on my Bible stories):

I'm gonna go take a cold shower

Is there a shadow of a wang back there???

Came across one that's new to me. And by came across, I mean I saw it at Heritage (3720 hammer last week, 5 copies in census including 2 over 9.0): I like it. A very Fox-like cover (but not a Fox cover artist). Squarebound digest, 132 pages. Two issue run from Comic Media. Artful is the shell publisher on the second one according to GCD. Skeleton index for #2, no index for 1. Just 3 in the census for #2. Super scarce, especially #2? And a sister romance, Confessions of Love, also 2 issues, same format, neither indexed at the GCD. Issue one, same release month as the above, same artist to my eye, sold for 495 back in 2011. Also a good one. A litle more skin, a little more assault :I, and a bit of kitsch comedy with the wedding night honeymoon horror tag. Much prefer the cover on the Honeymoon Romance #1, though. 3 copies in the census for #1, 1 copy for #2. Even scarcer than the other title? Comic Media only used this format for these two titles? Anybody ID the artist on the #1s? Curious what the insides look like if anybody is holding a raw copy - -