About the Project
The Pulp Magazines Project is an open-access digital archive dedicated to the study and preservation of one of the twentieth century's most influential literary & artistic forms: the all-fiction pulpwood magazine. The Project also provides information on the history of this important but long neglected medium, along with biographies of pulp authors, artists, and their publishers.
At the heart of the Project's mission is the archive itself. In July 2011, it began with a modest library of five representative first-generation titles from the early twentieth century. As of March 2012, this number had grown to include over seventy-five individual issues, representing thirty-nine different titles from both the US and England. Over time, it will continue to expand, as new magazines are digitized, and new contextual materials added. Eventually, the archive will feature a broad range of pre-1923 titles, post-1923 titles where copyright has lapsed, and full volume runs of select titles from 1896 to 1946.
The Project is not currently supported by any major grant, research funding, or institutional endowment. All operating costs are handled exclusively out-of-pocket. We are actively seeking grant support and other sources of funding, along with a host institution to provide long-term access to reliable servers.
The Project is dedicated to fostering ties between communities of collectors, fans, and academics devoted to pulp magazines, and will offer opportunities for research and collaboration to both scholars and enthusiasts alike. We will provide information on upcoming conferences and conventions, and promote new working relationships between academics and the hundreds of pulp fans, scholars, and collectors beyond the college and university.
Mission Statement
Pulp originally referenced the quality of the magazines' paper: using coarse, untreated paper made from wood-pulp kept production costs low, allowing the magazines to be distributed and sold as cheaply as possible-in many cases, without advertising. It was an incredibly successful formula; by 1915, 8 best-selling titles had a combined monthly circulation of 2.7 million copies, or an estimated readership of nearly 15% of the US population. For a brief history of the pulps, see Mike Ashley's 'The Golden Age of Pulp Fiction'.
Despite their enormous influence, two factors would contribute to the pulps' degraded cultural status in academic departments and scholarship today. Materially, pulps epitomized the ephemerality of popular print media: on par with advertisements, movie posters, and daily newspapers. Their success also correlated with mass-production and marketing techniques; challenging institutionalized notions of culture's place outside the economic sphere.
Libraries at several major research institutions across the United States do contain substantial holdings of pulps, including the Library of Congress, UCLA (Black Mask), Syracuse University (the Street & Smith archives), and Texas A&M University (Weird Tales). There are also major collectors' conventions held annually each summer in Chicago and Columbus, Ohio. The archives are relatively few and far between; the conventions scarcely provide an environment conducive to research. The Project hopes to, in part, address this problem of availability and accessibility.
Partnerships
The PMP archive of digitized magazines consists of full-text, cover-to-cover scans produced in collaboration with a variety of partners. Represented in the archive are periodicals scanned by the PMP, Pulpscans Group, Scanrus, Digital Pulp Preservation, Newsstand: 1925, Conrad First, and others. All scans are made directly from the original pulp-paper magazines, have been cross-checked against multiple sources to ensure integrity, and are stored and shared across multiple servers to maintain long-term availability and use.
If you are a scanner and have any magazines that may be of interest, actual or digital—and that you are willing to donate to the Project—it would be greatly appreciated. Or, if you would like to contribute a biographical note (approx. 500 words) to the website's database, email us here: info@pulpmags.org
Statement of Copyright
The materials in the digitized magazines linked to this website are for non-commercial, educational purposes only. To the best of our knowledge, they are out of copyright or are presented in a limited capacity for good faith. If you or anyone you know owns the copyright to the periodicals, material, or photographs included here, please contact us. Otherwise, all photographs & pulp images on the website are the © copyright of their respective owners.
Contact Information
For questions or comments, email us here: info@pulpmags.org
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