Dime Novels/Pulp Novels

[Ijiwaru Sensei]

Hey, this is my first post in the GA comic section of the forum and was wondering if you guys could help answer a novice's question.

 

What distinguishes dime novels from pulp novels? My understanding is that dime novels were written primarily for young men with various content, typically adventure stories or tales of the Wild West. Don't pulp novels cover much the same ground?

[seank]

IIRC, and someone like Scrooge knows more than me, but I believe dime novels predated pulps. Dime novels started in the 1800s and died out in the early pulp days.

 

And, hey, guess what, Wikipedia is our friend.

[Cimm]

Dime novels were also printed a bit differently... in appearance they were more like a small newspaper, or leaflet, only rarely being thick enough to warrant a lettered spine. The pulp as we know it didn't come about until around 1898 or so, when some general information type magazines switched to fiction formats. Argosy, All-Story Weekly, Youth's Companion, and a few others came along, then in the 19teens, genre specific magazines came along, like Flynn's Detective Weekly, Adventure, and in 1923 Weird Tales, Black Mask Detective, and so on, came on the scene, and from there, by the mid-thirties, you had sci-fi, horror, adventure, the Spicy line, and so on...

[Ijiwaru Sensei]

 

And, hey, guess what, Wikipedia is our friend.

 

But we all know that info from forum members is far more reliable than Wikipedia.

[Ijiwaru Sensei]

Thanks for the good info.

[Scrooge]

IIRC, and someone like Scrooge knows more than me, but I believe dime novels predated pulps. Dime novels started in the 1800s and died out in the early pulp days.

 

Thanks for the vote of confidence but it's probably undeserved here. I think Cimm covered it fairly well and I am sure the Wikipedia entry is fine.

 

To me the biggest difference is not re-the content but the format. In addition to Cimm's mentions, dime novels generally only had the cover illustrated and the interior was nothing but tight text. Pulp does differentiate itself by the type of fiction involved which is indeed less juvenile in nature. In the end, there is no clear distinction and we're moving along a continuum. In fact, it's not really until the mid- to late-20's, some 20 years after what we consider pulp started being published that the term pulps became common-place.