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General Fiction - Argosy, Adventure, Short Stories, Blue Book & more
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107 posts in this topic

10 minutes ago, OtherEric said:

How long did it take you to track down a copy, or was it a target of opportunity?

Found it waiting for me on a dealer's site right after deciding to find a copy a couple of weeks ago. It was my lucky day!

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56 minutes ago, Scrooge said:

Found it waiting for me on a dealer's site right after deciding to find a copy a couple of weeks ago. It was my lucky day!

Always wonderful when you can turn up something like that... in my limited experience, it's fairly easy still to find Argosies... but it can be quite tricky to find any specific issue.

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8 hours ago, OtherEric said:

Always wonderful when you can turn up something like that... in my limited experience, it's fairly easy still to find Argosies... but it can be quite tricky to find any specific issue.

True, Argosy is not hard to find but if you look closely it's no different than comics, key issues are not available. The ones you find skip around the issues with desirable authors or serials so you'll see all of June until the desirable July issues with a let's say 4-part Zorro and those aren't available and then the August issues appear etc. Plus, it's like comics, a lot of sellers don't know how to price them so you get outlandish prices for low demand issues. I was fortunate in finding this book.

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4 hours ago, Scrooge said:

Adventure, May 1, 1931 -

I just read the Tabot Mundy short story: Black Flag from the issue. It's a tight story of revenge on the Spanish Main. After his boat is captured and sunk by fire, a captain's life is spared because he performs dentistry for his captors. After serving as a slave, the doomed captain finds a subterfuge to escape. Blackmailing his original ship's owner, he comes back with a new ship to exact revenge, succesfully but loses the second ship in the act. Mundy succesfully establishes several characters in few pages. I tend not to particular like nautical terminology in stories but Mundy pulled off the description of the naval action with clarity in this one.

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10 hours ago, Scrooge said:

I just read the Tabot Mundy short story: Black Flag from the issue. It's a tight story of revenge on the Spanish Main. After his boat is captured and sunk by fire, a captain's life is spared because he performs dentistry for his captors. After serving as a slave, the doomed captain finds a subterfuge to escape. Blackmailing his original ship's owner, he comes back with a new ship to exact revenge, succesfully but loses the second ship in the act. Mundy succesfully establishes several characters in few pages. I tend not to particular like nautical terminology in stories but Mundy pulled off the description of the naval action with clarity in this one.

Oh and I forgot to add: reading these has multiple layers. Aside from the story, I am always on the lookout for such elements as "turn of phrases" that are pulp-ish (though I will say that I am annoyed by the connotation that "pulp" as a genre has taken today; it pays no homage to the writers of, say, Adventure or Argosy, who though paid by the words did not for that fact try to deliver any less well-crafted prose. If they did, their next story would not be accepted!) or antiquated / obsolete words.

Mundy's writing is not pulpish but he can sneak in some nice lines in that vein once in a while: "Mendoza smote her one night on her impudent, sensuous mouth with a fist that had hell in its knuckles."

Mundy uses the archaic "chirurgeon" in lieu of surgeon, which was nice as surgeon in French is still "chirurgien". It was nice to see the link from old french to old english to the current version of the word.

Edited by Scrooge
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On 3/27/2021 at 8:40 AM, Scrooge said:

Adventure, November 15, 1927 - Cover by Emmett Watson

Read Down in a dugout by Leonard H Nason. Short story rather humourous about a treasure trove of Champagne in an abandoned German dugout in No Man's Land that three different parties are looking for: a group of doughboys, a group of English officers and a group of German soldiers. The doughboys get to wet their whistles, the Germans die in the dugout and the officers miss out on the bounty. Pleasant. Nason's obituary lists his as Colonel and a veteran of both World Wars.

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23 hours ago, 50YrsCollctngCmcs said:

Wow those Adventure covers are really beautiful. Was this pulp known for any famous stories? I have not heard of it before; who was the publisher?

Adventure was published by Ridgway Publishing Company. For a complete history, check this A history of Adventure Magazine or the entry in Wikipedia.

Adventure, February 20, 1925 - Cover by Frank Herbst

The cover here has a stamp of The Ridgway Co. Since the pulps like comics were entered as Second Class Printed matter, you see here that the company has a stamp to confirm the ratio of Content other than ads (91%) to Advertising Matter (09%) as per the representative of the company

728883332_Adventure-February20th1925.thumb.jpg.23169d5a38d5f25cc6a5b77c48d5761c.jpg

Also, the back cover has an ad for Everybody's Magazine -

1466279840_Adventure-February20th1925-BC.thumb.jpg.cc02f3a30697aed24b70c4f967cfac83.jpg

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Right, just going to post a few of the issues I've already got scanned each day, since i still haven't replaced my scanner.  I think some of them are already on the previous page, but I'm just going in order.  These three are all from 1921, so a century old now.  They each have part of the original serialization of "Tarzan the Terrible"; but I've only got 3 of the 7 parts:

Argosy_1921_02_26.jpg

Argosy_1921_03_05.jpg

Argosy_1921_03_19.jpg

Edited by OtherEric
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