14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Most Important Guide to the Pulps Ever Published!, September 21, 2000
This review is from: Adventure House Guide to the Pulps (Paperback)
I've been a collector of pulps for nearly forty years. I own one of the largest pulp magazine collections in the world and have written numerous books and articles about these great magazines. The pulps are a major part of American publishing that have never gotten the attention they deserved. Great authors from Dashiell Hammett to H.P. Lovecraft to Robert Bloch to Ray Bradbury all began writing in the pulps.
However, there's always been one major obstacle in collecting pulp magazines. There has never been a comprehensive guide to exactly what magazines exist. When buying pulps, you never know if you are getting one of three issues or one of a hundred. The volume numbers were deceiving as many publishers mixed them up or never used them properly. Many pulps were even dated wrong. As a collector, I went crazy for years trying to discover what pulps existed. That's all changed with this book.
For the first time ever a collector can discover exactly how many issues of Weird Tales or Black Mask or literally a thousand other magazines were published. And know the exact dates of the issues. This guide is a perfect checklist for anyone who wants to collect the pulps or wants to know when they were published. It is a book aimed at pulp fans and pulp collectors. This book was never intended to be a pulp price guide or some sort of index to the contents of pulp magazines. It does exactly what it promises and does it extremely well. It is a checklist of what pulps were published and when. That information is invaluable to anyone who is a collector, fan, or researcher involved in the pulp field.
As a collector, fan, and researcher I found this book incredibly valuable. My only complaint is that it wasn't done thirty or forty years ago. If you are interested in the pulps, this is a book you must own.
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Must-Buy for the true Pulp Collector!, September 23, 2000
This review is from: Adventure House Guide to the Pulps (Paperback)
This must truly rank as one of the most outstanding reference books to be published in recent years. For an area of collecting as popular as pulp magazines, it is truly amazing to realise that (outside of specialist subsets like SF, fantasy and horror) the area was largely unmapped prior to this volume.
For a collector interested in Western pulps and wanting to know if he had a complete set of, say, SPICY WESTERN STORIES, there was no way of finding out. As for knowing how many other Western pulps had existed, and when they were published, and who by, the average collector didn't stand a chance.
And if you were unlucky enough to be interested in even less popular areas - Sports, Love Stories, War or whatever - your position was even more hopeless as you were reduced to scanning eBay every day to see if something new had turned up.
With this ground-breasking volume, all that has changed. A mind-boggling 1000 different pulp titles have been meticulously researched, with precise details for each of exactly which issues were published (and when, and by whom).
As if that were not enough, each of the 320 pages has thumbnail reproductions of five covers of magazines on that page (as well as a gallery at the end with a further 180 thumbnails) so that I can see all these wonderful magazines at last. Before this wonderful book, I wondered if WILD GAME STORIES really existed (who would publish such a bizarre title) - now I not only know that it did, but I know it lasted for 6 issues in 1926 and can see two of the covers!
This book is certainly not for everyone. If you have only a passing interest in pulps you should buy Frank Robinson's excellent PULP CULTURE. If you're only interested in making money by looking for rare pulps cheap, then go buy a price guide. But if you're a true pulp fan/collector, you cannot afford to do without this volume.
Of course it has its faults. As a Brit, I regret the omission of many obscure UK-specific pulps and, while I understand their reason for omitting the "risque fiction magazines", I regret that too. However, I trust all this will be addressed in the eagerly-awaited SECOND ADVENTURE GUIDE TO THE PULPS (if only we can persuade these guys to write it!).
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An absolute god send for the Pulp collector!, September 22, 2000
This review is from: Adventure House Guide to the Pulps (Paperback)
If only I had had this guide years ago when I first started in the hobby! I loved the essays, which were written by three of the most respected professionals in the field-as opposed to speculators just entering the hobby. The boxes make it easy to see at a glance how many I need to collect, and let me write in prices or notes for each pulp. A true time saver and a curse. Now I see titles I never knew existed but absolutely must get my hands on! I absolutely recommend this book as one of the two books every pulp collector MUST have on their book shelf!
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