Word: pulp
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Competition is keen in this type of pulp, but it is a very friendly sort of competing. The editors concerned are really pals- probably because they are first fans, and then editors. An interesting item in this competition concerns my own editorial work in Science Fiction. At the age of 17, when I first came into charge of Wonder Stories, one of my competitors, T. O'Conor Sloane of Amazing Stories...
Sold at U. S. newsstands are about a dozen pulp magazines with such titles as Amazing Stories, Astounding Stones, Startling Stories, Strange Stories, Fantastic Adventures, Thrilling Wonder Stones, Unknown, Marvel Science Stories, Weird Tales. In the pulp trade they are known as "pseudo-scientifics" or "scientifiction." This week in Manhattan this amazing group of publications produced an amazing show: a convention of their fans...
...Wells's fantasies. Father of pseudo-scientific magazines was a shrewd, fat old man named Hugo Gernsback, an old-time radio fan, who in 1926 started Amazing Stories. It zoomed like a moonward rocket. Today the magazines in this prosperous publishing group (chiefly controlled by the big pulp firms of Street & Smith, Standard Magazines and Ziff-Davis), average about 150,000 readers apiece (sometimes much more), make a good living for many a shamo-scientific writer...
Scientifiction's fans, mostly boys of 16 to 20, are the jitterbugs of the pulp magazine field. Many keep every issue, and a copy of the magazine's first issue often fetches $25 from collectors. Publishers soon discovered another odd fact about their readers: They are exceptionally articulate. Most of these magazines have letters columns, in which readers appraise stories. Sample: "Gosh! Wow! Boyoh-boy!, and so forth and so on. Yesiree, yesiree, it's the greatest in the land and the best that's on the stand, and I do mean THRILLING WONDER STORIES...
...Grapes of Wrath (verdict: an exciting novel with a weak last half). A verse group was entertained by Dorothy Parker with a speech called Sophisticated Verse, and the hell with it. A fiction group heard a dozen speeches, ranging from talks on how to worm social-conscious fiction into pulp magazines to Dashiell Hammett's warning that Hollywood techniques are poison to novelists...