The pulp magazines or “pulps”, as they were then called, were of great importance to fans of detective fiction, science fiction, horror stories and fantasy. Appearing in the late 19th century, these magazines opened up the publishing space that in the second half of the 20th century was flooded with popular novels by the likes of Stephen King and Michael Crichton. Now we have the ability to sail the sea with these treasures in digitized form.

Flipping through thousands of back issues, which are accessible in the Pulp Magazine Archive, gives us a sense of just how unusual and scandalous such magazines once were. This trait of theirs survived in the underground comics and fanzines of the 1960s and beyond, as well as in tabloids like Scream Queens.

The massive archive contains thousands of digitized issues of magazines such as ‘If’, ‘True Detective Mysteries’, ‘Whitchcraft and Sorcery’, ‘Weird Tales’, ‘Uncensored Detective’, ‘Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang’ and ‘Adventure’. But also old celebrity flyers like ‘Movie Pictorial’ and ‘Hush Hush’ and retrospectives like ‘Dirty Comics’, a 1990s reprint of the often misogynistic comic art of the 1930s.

The journey begins at the link https://archive.org/details/pulpmagazinearchive?sort=titleSorter.