Pulp Magazines.

Between the end of the nineteenth century and the 1950’s, a large portion of new mystery and detective fiction saw its first publication in the pages of popular pulp magazines. The pulps, as they were familiarly known, took their name from the cheap wood-pulp paper on which their text pages were printed. Generally measuring seven by ten inches, the brittle, short-fibered pages were fragile and difficult to preserve, but the magazines’ vividly colored covers were usually printed on stiffer and higher-quality, coated stock and were easily the most attractive and durable parts of the magazines. Most of the pulps published genre fiction—Westerns, men’s adventure stories, and science fiction, in addition to mystery and detective fiction—and their cover art generally depicted lurid subjects. Mystery and detective fiction antedates the pulp magazines, but during the twentieth century the pulps published more stories in that genre than any other format.