Customer Reviews

Adventure House Guide to the Pulps

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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.

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!).

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!

Any pulp collector with any size collection needs this essential resource. The biggest issue in collecting the more obscure (and often less expensive!) pulps is the lack of information on these publications. This fills that and other information voids.

Plus, as any collector knows, anything that prompts one to go through one's collection is a "must have".

The great pulp magazines are unfamiliar territory to many people, and this Guide offers valuable data for both the serious collector, and people with general interest in the pulps. Publishing dates, number of issues, as well as an overview of the magazines and other great information makes the Guide a valuable item. While bits and pieces of this information on individual titles are available in other forms, this is the first effort to pull it all together, including data on some very unusual and obscure titles. I found the book very useful, and I'm sure other pulp enthusiasts will too.

"The Adventure House Guide to the Pulps" is a seminal book for pulp magazine collectors. A three-year project reflecting a lifetime of collecting on the part of its three author/editors--Doug Ellis, John Gunnison and John Locke--this book should find a cherished spot on every collector's shelf. It lists by year and date 97 percent of all the pulp magazines ever published from October, 1896 to when they died in the mid-fifties. The book has a long introductory history that is a valuable resource in and of itself, as well as thumnail photographs of most of the magazines covered. Each issue gets a small box in which the buyer can check off the issue in his own collection--and keep track of those he still needs. The book is NOT a price guide--anybody who follows eBay knows the futility of that. Nor is it intended as a pictorial history of the field. But for a collector to see at a glance how many issues of a magazine were published, their date, the publishing company that issued them, etc., is information that's usually not readily available and is hard to come by. One thing for sure, if Lawrence Davidson and I had had this book prior to compiling "Pulp Culture" (now out of print), it would have made our task far easier. The author/editors are to be congratulated for a book that should be on every collector's--and every library's--shelf. Highly recommended. -- Frank M. Robinson, San Francisco, CA.

This GUIDE is something pulp fans have been waiting for for decades. It's the first really comprehensive checklist to almost all of the pulp magazines that proliferated from the mid 1890s to the mid-1950s. GUIDE may be a bit of a misnomer, as it doesn't give a potted history of each pulp -- you'd need several thousand pages to do that. But it provides a useful grid system which allows you to determine just how many issues there were and when they appeared. It's really a Collector's Checklist, aided by a running gallery of covers, which reproduces at least one cover from just about every pulp, itself a rare treat. The amount of time and effort and research which has gone into a book like this is incalculable, and it now serves as the standard research tool for pulp collections and the basis upon which to build substantial surveys of the pulps. Now all we need is a companion title for the British pulps!

This book gathers together much information that for years has been scattered throughout very difficult to find out of print fan publications and expensive ($100+) library reference books.

BUT....the real heart of the matter here is the first appearance of checklists for 100's of titles. Several of these title were among the bestselling fiction magazines of the 20th century (i. e. Argosy which ran for more than 1500 issues-many of which were published weekly). Some of the titles included are so esoteric that I have not seen a single copy in over 25 years of pulp collecting!

The essays at the front of the book will be very helpful for the novice pulp collector and are entertaining for the long time pulp fan.

If you collect pulp magazines this book is pretty much a must have. I bought two, one to keep and one to use. Thanks to the authors for the staggering amount of research that went into this volume.

I enjoyed this book very much.

The book is a lot of fun to look at for anyone interested in pulp magazines. It is also a great tool for collectors in that it provides a check list of hundreds of issues. Using the book you can find out exactly how many issues of a particular magazine were published along with the publication dates.

The cover is a great work of art! The black and white interior illustrations are also nice.

I keep this book on my night stand and usually look through it everynight before bed.

There's been a lot of debate over the past half-decade as to whether pulp collectors and pulp fans need a price guide, or some kind of guide, or any guide at all. Of course internet sites such as eBay may well be creating a whole new generation of pulp collectors who are as innocent as newborn babes, but the general feeling has been that nothing can be done or should be done to bring them up to the mark of slightly having a clue.

Well, this "guide" serves to suggest that no guide at all is better than what we will probably get. Here we have more than 330 pages which at first glance appear to be completely blank. A closer look shows, toward the front, a few short introductory essays in a type-font as big as baseballs. There follows, for each pulp, a simple grid of oblong rectangles that are supposed to convey some information, but what information they are supposed to convey, other than that an issue exists of a certain date, is completely unknown to your humble correspondent. Take a simple example. There was a pulp called COMET, which appears to have 5 issues between late 1940 and mid 1941. Was this an sf pulp? An aviation pulp? A hero pulp featuring a masked avenger named "Comet"? Or what? You'll never find out here. Nor will you learn any more about any other pulp, whether obscure or well-known, much beyond the bare fact that it existed!!!

I wish I had my $29.95 back, deed I do!!!!