The legendary pulp magazines of the 1930's and 1940's are among the most unique of America's contributions to world popular culture. They are remembered because of the superb writers from Dashiell Hammett and H.P. Lovercragt t Ray Bradbury and Tennessee Williams. It is also the artwork, bold, dramatic, garishly colorful, and frequently grotesque-- that has made the pulps so memorable to so many people.

Some of the most important cover artist like Virgil Finlay, John Allen St. John, Rafael de Sota, Hannes Bok, George and Jerome Rozen, Frank R. Paul, Norman Saunders, Walter Baumhofer, Rudolph Belarski, are just some of the cover artist that are in our catalog of images.

The pulp magazine industry flourished during the Great Depression's low bottom. Some publishers got rich but not many. the one thing they did do was create jobs for artist, writers, and printers ; steady work, away from bread lines, soup kitchens, and apartment evictions. Printed on the cheapest paper ( pulp ) made for 2 cents, wholesaled for a nickel, and newsstand priced for a dime.

The pulp cover paintings, spanning over three decades, have been forgotten, neglected, and largely lost. 45th Street Editions is in the process of digitally restoring these images.

Everything the pulps were was summarized in their covers. Like the circus sideshow banners that drew in the public with lurid paintings of freaks and beasts, the pulp covers also promised more than they delivered. Yet readers got their money's worth, a complete novel or novelette and several short stories in an issue, all for 10 or 15 cents, a bargain price. Essentially aimed at male readers, cover art zeroed in on heroes and hellcats, frontiersmen and foreign legionnaires, loggers and leathernecks, spacemen and space women, pirates and pilots, gangsters and gun molls, Mounties, monsters, and of course, maidens in distress-- or undress! With few exceptions pulps were produced to be amusing and entertaining.

more to come when I'm up to it. See Ya