The Pulp Era Ends, Again (Breaking News)

Given that we are a website dedicated to history and news about pulp magazines and given that there is all of one pulp magazine publisher of note remaining, one would think that we would be all over the demise of such. But no. Took me totally by surprise. I can't even claim a scoop amongst my fellow pulp magazine bloggers, some of whom reported this story as early as August. It seems Dorchester Media is about to go blinky.

To be honest, the Pulp Era really popped like a soap bubble with the absorbing of the Globe Magazine pulp holdings into the Macfadden-Spawned American Media, owner of the National Enquirer. That pretty much put all of the remaining pulps and tabloids under one roof. And that roof caved in on the pulps. They were all canceled soon after the merger.

Those that weren't spun off and given to Dorchester, that is. Whenever I say the Pulp Era isn't really over, I point to Dorchester. Its pulp titles, at last note, had a monthly circulation of 2 million copies. I may be pointing at air fairly soon, if what I've been reading elsewhere is true. It's never good when a business finds itself googled together with the phrase "Death March" on a regular basis. And there have been some less kind phrases also cropping up, which I will go into later.

I've never been entirely sure what Dorchester is. It seems it's an investor group which plucked the romance titles away from American Media at some point. Their website said they had been in business since 1971, but as what isn't spelled out. I know they didn't start many of the magazines they now publish. And other than the old pulps, they don't appear to be in the magazine business at all. With a reported six employees left, it may be hard to say they are in any business soon.




Dorchester is the custodian of some absolutely ancient first, second and third era pulp magazines. Any of these magazines would have been the Jewel In The Crown for an old line pulp publisher. First and foremost is True Story, Bernarr Mafadden's flagship launched in 1919. It is all that is left of Macfadden's empire, along with True Romance/True Romances (1923) and True Experiences/True Experience (1925) which Dorchester also publishes. They are the publisher of the venerable, but often sold Secrets/Best of Secrets which is thought to date back to 1936. And they have Fawcett's old and emblematic True Confessions (1922) which at one time was called Fawcett's Magazine. All of these are very nice titles.



Ok, perhaps "nice" isn't the word. They were NEVER very nice. Led by the new look version of True Confessions, they started going in for a more up front and vulgar presentation in the mid 1940s. Not being nice was the way that they separated themselves from the tamer romance comic books. The not nice presentation trend worked wonders and soon brought in more publishers.



Who contributed not much, other than to filch titles and continue the not nice presentation. The not nice presentation then jumped to True Crime and to the Men's Adventure trend. The whole field became so homogenized by this that titles themselves run into each other, even if you know what you are looking at. Above could be a copy of True Romances the Macfadden pulp or a knock off using a permutation of the name.



The fact of the matter is that vulgar worked. It saved the pulps. Flaunting taboos and trafficking in the unmentionable became common in all of the genres. (Or at least all of the ones that survived in magazine form.)



That the True Crime and other sensationalist magazines vanished is an unhappy accident of history. They all wound up in the same tent where the powers that be decided they liked the tabloid format better than the magazine format. As you can see from True Experiences directly above, pulps had no problem adding celeb scandal to their sob stories. In the last posting, I showed you some movie magazines which had gone the same way.



To say that the Hollywood obsession or taboo flaunting were part of a new look is also a little misleading. Here we have an early issue of True Confessions wherein aristocratic silent film starlet Delores Del Rio--Hollywood's Woman of Fate describes getting drunk and getting it on amongst the gliteratti. Even our top cover, the one with the lady in the neat hat, is captioned 'Trapped in New York's Vice Den." I'm sure her position at the Vice Den is hardly G-rated. The cover of True Romance below that shows a bound woman being forcibly groped. So they were never really "nice" at all. It just took them a while to embrace their inner trailer park.



As a man, I can honestly say that I don't get these magazines at all. Oh, I get them, as in understanding the structure of the stories they present. And I literally get them. I used to have a subscription to True Story. I buy the Best of Secrets every time I see it. I even read the things. But I do not get them, as in understand the attraction. How many rape fantasies skullduggery men mooching off me tales of overcoming shyness by being ravaged by a blue collar drunk do you need? Surely, women have progressed beyond this. You are woman, hear you roar!

Perhaps it's something akin to the Three Stooges or Professional Wrestling. You ain't gonna get it unless you have a set--in this case, breasts.

It's an absolutely ancient pulp genre and, if what the publisher is saying can be believed, still strong in magazine form. From what we know, the circulation of the magazines is not what is towing Dorchester down. Or at least not directly.

Not all of Dorchester's problems are of its own making. The firm was stiffed to the tune of three million dollars by two distributors who went belly up. Worse, these were the type of distributors Dorchester needed most: the ones who sell through pharmacies and 7-11 type stores. Due to the positioning of tabloids, they don't do very well in supermarkets. And they are not high brow enough for book stores.

That said, half of the circulation of these magazines, 1 million copies, is subscription. No doubt being stiffed 3 mega is bad for the cash flow mojo, but that's only half the sales of the magazines. Dorchester was also being hurt by its primary business, which is as a genre paperback house.

The firm is said to have got into paperbacks by exploiting the True Confessions name brand. From there, they branched into romance. They also catered to the under-served western and horror markets along with the somewhat crowded hard boiled detective market. I will spare you the various run-downs I found other than to say only two out of every ten books they printed sold That's one less than they need to break even and two less what they need to make money.

It's been characterized as a tale of economics gone wrong, proof of the death of the retail paperback (which it may be*) and yet another storm cloud sweeping the face of publishing. The canary died first. Blah, blah.

I'm not buying it. Once it became clear Dorchester was goin down, a number of authors started chiming in on how they had not been paid royalties regularly FOR YEARS. I thought some of their offerings were a little suspect--the type of thing only the small press goes for. Mind you, some of it looked neat. You certainly can take a lot of chances on material if you are not paying for it. Many authors just want to see their names in print. It was only after Dorchester announced that they weren't actually going to print anything that some of these authors started yapping and blogging.

A fish rots from the head down and from everything I've ever read about the fish head of Dorchester, he was a fairly rotten businessman. By rotten, I mean he was essentially an accountant brought in by the investor group to ring out the till every night. Not exactly visionary. In one interview I read he let his contempt for the magazines' audience of sob story lovers show through unvarnished. His only real enthusiasm I heard voiced was for publishing reprints of stories from the archives--which made him smile because it was pure profit. If even part of what else has been printed about Dorchester turns out to be true, the imprint is dead in the water with the industry. You don't sell things you don't own. You don't continue to take orders you can't fulfill. You don't claim to change your direction every two minutes. And, over time, screwing your writers gets around.People have long memories in this racket.

As of the 11th of this month Dorchester has a new CEO. He sounds even more like an accountant--this one the type who liquidates. My only hope is that they haven't mucked up the magazines so badly that they can't be sold to another publisher. Dorchester may not care for its one million sob story enthusiasts, but I am sure another publisher will.

Somewhat. Dorchester is a monopolist. No one else is in the trashy romance rag business anymore. If all the titles vanish, there may be an assumption that their market has also. That's sort of what happened to the True Crime pulps. If that happens then the Pulp Era has come to an end.



*I will handle the decline and seeming fall of the paperback in another post.

Coda:

My best guess is that Dorchester's magazines are in reprint mode. If they do that over a long haul, it will damage the titles greatly. Your average reader has been with these magazines for decades. If they are to be sold, they need to be sold soon.

The whole Dorchester story doesn't seem to have set much of a fire in many quarters. Perhaps it is because they are a yucky love book line and all of us pulp types are men. Most of the gnashing of teeth I read was reserved for the demise of its paperback lines. To each their own.

I stumbled onto the story yesterday. I was going through a magazine subscription offering when I noticed two titles I did not immediately recognize. One of them was for True Love, seemingly a magazine. I could not recall if it had been a pulp or not. Or if Dorchester published it. So I hit up Dorchester's website and found it totally malfunctioning. Some of the things they said about back orders and ebooks and whatnot got me scrambling on the search engines. I really had no idea anything was wrong with the firm. I had just picked up my copy of Secrets--which always sells out all five copies within days of showing at my 7-11.

As it turns out, Dorchester does publish True Love. I have no idea how old it is because none of the pulp databases have covered it. It's probably decades old. Just shows how us male historians are willing to turn a blind eye to what was (and is) a bread and butter pulp genre.

Also in the subscription offerings was another NEW PULP, an accounts fiction offering called Angels On Earth. It's all about Angel sightings. We here at Hil-Gle are all for fiction and new genres and everything, but wowsers, what horseshit.