Second World War and Pulp Magazines

Pulp magazines and pulp novels are commonly known as low quality literature which had been designed specifically for the working class readers. The price of the pulp books had always had to be affordable for people who could not normally spend money on expensive literature. This means that the pulp fiction novels also appeared on cheap, pulp paper as well as cheap printing quality. Here are some facts about the history of the pulp magazine, the magazine that most people tend to berate. Moreover, here one can read more about the fate of the pulp fiction novels during the Second World War.

The pulp novels have been available ever since the late 1890s and they kept on increasing in popularity among the people they were intended for. However, the second world war brought along an era of decline for the pulp novels and implicitly the pulp magazines. It was now that a shortage of paper was registered and the costs of publishing rose to the extent that people would find the costs of these magazines too much to be worth to keep on printing them. The trend of printing fewer pages in pulp magazines was started but the Ellery Queen’s Mystery magazine which began printing smaller and thinner magazines. This was happening in 1941. Few years later however, in 1949 the other very important pulp magazine publisher Street & Smith closed most of their magazines as well in order to be able to produce slicks.

At the same time, specialists say that the pulp magazines were not declining in popularity only because of the rising costs, but also because they faced fierce competition coming from similar but rather different magazines and other entertainment means such as comic books, television and so on. moreover, many experts would say that the 1957 year could be regarded as a decisive one in the history of pulp magazines as it was the year in which the most popular pulps such as Black Mask or Doc Savage were all gone.