Pulp Censorship (Pulp History)

This may be the shortest article I’ve ever written on the subject of pulp magazine history.

It didn’t happen. Pulp magazines faced little in the way of organized or widespread censorship. They were seldom banned from newsstands or forbidden to use the mails. And none were ever censored nor prevented from publishing. All in all, the U.S. government took scant action against the pulps.

Comic Books were burned in the 1950s. The entire comic book industry was forced into a self-regulation regime. But comic books are not really a type of pulp magazine, nor were they treated as such. Both pulp publishers and comic book publishers were investigated by various committees of Congress.  American pulp magazines faced import bans and censorship in Canada, Australia and South Africa. In the end, the pulps which survived WWII were essentially boycotted out of business. Although the boycott was organized and  effective, it was not driven by consumers or political actors.  

But all of the above are incidents, bumps in the road, and hardly the stuff of a building narrative. The history of pulp magazines is fairly devoid of class struggle.  Or battles pitting conservatives against liberals. The pulps did not fight any glorious uphill battle against the forces of censorship. Editorially the pulps made their livings on sex and violence, but were otherwise politically all over the board.

So there is no broad story to be told here. In true pulp bait and switch fashion, I am therefor changing our topic to:

How The Pulps Avoided Censorship: 

Flouting Community Standards for Fun and Profit, 

a tale of Market Forces in Action.

There are three types of pulp magazines: Common Carriers, Narrowcasters and Stock Shock.

·         Common Carriers: these are fiction anthologies without a theme, or general interest magazines noted for their fiction content. A number of early pulps fall into this category. Of the early entries, many are converted Story Papers, conventional magazines as we know them, only printed on pulp stock. Others don’t have a specific genre of fiction that they are peddling, but rather a slant or a standard of quality. You could include Weird Tales, Blue Book and Adventure in this slot, but it is more intended for names such as Everybody’s and Brief Stories.  

·    Narrowcasters: These are fiction anthologies pitching a set genre, pitching a set range of genres, or are continuing character magazines. 90% of all pulp magazines ever published fall under this broad heading. Once the pulp magazine field developed, the producers started drilling down on what each title was specifically offering.  

·         Stock Shock: Girlie Magazines, True Crime, True Romance, Sensationalism, Movie Fan and Gossip. Gossip was a late entry into the pulp form, later jumping the pond, reverting to Story Paper format (Supermarket Tabloids) and then evolving into a slick section (People Magazine and its clones). Girlie magazines came in with the modern magazine format itself, the sole purpose of which was to reproduce photographs. Pulp Girlie magazines padded out their not quite as naughty bits with pulp stock paper. True Crime and Sensationalism predated the pulp format, porting their wares in from the Story Papers. Venerable Girlie Magazine/True Crime/Sports rag Police Gazette led the switch to pulp and then other pulp publishers jumped in to duplicate it. Pulps also originated their own sleaze slants, such as the smutty romance Flapper Fiction trend (Breezy Stories, Smart Set) and sleaze humor (College Humor, Film Fun). And they weren’t opposed to adding a bit of sleaze to their stock genres, signaling such by appending code words like Spicy to the titles.  While the Movie Fan magazines were not initially either pulp or sleazy, they did eventually slide into gossip.

During any given time in pulp magazine history, you are going to have a mix of the above, all garishly elbowing for space on the same newsstands and drug store shelves. It’s not an even mix. As mentioned, the Common Carriers faded, diminishing to a few titles by  1933. Narrowcasters flooded the market, becoming more narrow and more specific, genre splicing and sprouting more genres. Although they dominated the market, they were a follow the leader tribe, with die outs and emergences within the mix constantly occurring.  Once established, the girlie magazines, true crime and true romance titles became permanent denizens of the marketplace. They didn’t go out of style. They always sold.  They and the western romance titles were the longest lasting of the breed in pure pulp form, and the last of the breed standing. Sometimes the more downscale side of the taste spectrum was the entirety of the market.

Pulp magazines did not exist in a media vacuum.  They were only a part of the mainstream of American mass mediums early on. Like all magazines, they were edged from center stage in the consumption of the public’s time by the rise of movies, radio and then television. More than anything else, it was the rise of radio (starting in 1930) that caused a die out in the reading for fun and enlightenment habit. It wasn’t until the talking boxes became a mainstay of most homes that it was again safe to be an illiterate. Post radio, it was abundantly possible to be passably well informed quite passively. A full one third of the magazines and newspapers in the United States evaporated.

Pulp magazines are fake magazines. The modern magazine format is a post-Civil War invention, an innovation meant to mass reproduce photographs. Photographs on specific topics are the draw of the magazine medium. This may not seem all that attractive in today’s light, but prior to the availability of lithographic paper stock, photographs were custom made, short run items. So people bought magazines to obtain the photos, to be taken on an as true to life as possible tour of a specific topic. Pulp magazines do not use this wonderful paper stock, except on their covers. The interiors of a pulp magazine are made of newsprint… or something even worse. They share the same dimensions and general lay out of a real magazine. The pages are composed in accordance with the expectations of a magazine. But they don’t have any photographs. Instead they spotlight line art. It’s an unusual presentation: fiction dressed up as if it were a factual magazine article.

Magazines were a big deal at the time. As with comic strips today, there was a specific language to the layout of a magazine. Pulp magazines copied that language and applied it to fiction. Their stock and trade came to be the short story. Most packaged similar short stories together. Others peddled novel length works or a mix of short stories, serializations and novellas. Aping the mechanical dimensions of other magazines granted them shelf space. Once pulp magazines established themselves, they became a draw.  Pulp magazines were never a big part of the magazine market, but they held their place as the market for magazines itself contracted.

They were the most efficient fiction vehicles of their time. They came to specialize in an over the top presentation and a fast plotted style. During their history they minted a number of genres, but they also brought some baggage from previous vehicle types. Since our beat tonight is censorship, we need to touch on the warts accumulated by the pulp’s direct ancestors. This is really where the censorship bug started.

The terms Pulp, Dime Novel and Penny Dreadful are often used as synonyms.  Although these are actually different forms, there are some historical links. Pulp magazines are linear descendants of Dime Novels and Story Papers. (Many early pulp magazine titles started as either Dime Novels or Story Papers.) When it comes to the Story Papers, the sleaze was there from the start. When Police Gazette started its format of wall to wall orgies and mass murders in 1845, it was entering a crowded field. There were dozens of similar newspaper-like weekly publications recounting all manner of tales of blood lust, Indian misdeeds and sex escapades.  It was all made up. It was all lies. As a medium it might have been the most popular form of fiction in wide spread circulation at the time.

No one bothered to crack down on it. The material was kept away from impressionable eyes, being circulated in pool halls, bath houses, taverns, cigar stores, barber shops and other places adult men might congregate. Primarily the products of local newspapers, these publications were mostly regional and short run. It did have demonstrable sales appeal, some of which was ported into the later Dime Novel form.

In their original incarnation, Dime Novels resembled the Old Farmer’s Almanac. These are digests of center folded newsprint with a thin gauge cardboard cover. Later the Dime Novels came to resemble modern comic books, with a slick or colored cover over a single folio of 16 sheets of center stapled newsprint. In either mode, they’re sort of flimsy.

Dime Novels were the hit of the Civil War. Soldiers on both sides of the Civil War consumed Dime Novels by the score. They were popular on the home front, too. The original physical format that the Dime Novels used came to be the standard for all American magazine-like publications of the time. All periodicals are of these dimensions. The dynamics of the Dime Novel are driven by the mechanical considerations of the steam driven sheet fed press and the requirements of the post office for periodical literature, which had a discounted delivery rate.

What distinguishes a Dime Novel from other periodicals of the day is that they are not collections of articles or advertising vehicles, but rather one solid work of long form fiction. Most of the fiction was original and commissioned for the format. It’s really a paperback book in everything but the title. Dime Novels actually set the accepted word count for the American Novel at between 40 and 60 thousand words, which was the format’s staple limit. In order to qualify for periodical postage (Dime Novels were intended as a mail order item), these books are issued as numbers in a periodical series. In short, they’re paperbacks pretending to be magazines. Making matters more confusing: (1) Novels which sell well may be issued as another number in the same periodical series and (2) in order to increase their shelf life, Dime Novels are cover dated up to three years into the future.

In 1890 the United States Post Office finally cracked down on the Dime Novels, revoking their postage discount. (There were earlier crackdowns.) By that point the Dime Novels were no longer primarily distributed by the mails. They had upped their eye appeal by this point with spray on stencil covers and seeding their interiors with utterly random illustrations. They are now retail merchandise, inhabitants of that stack by the window at the general store. Also, as we detailed in another post, they were living on as nostalgia items.

At the close of the Civil War, the Dime Novel field largely went into reprint mode. They just kept pumping out the same titles, over and over, decade after decade. As a whole, the Dime Novel universe became tagged as Y-A material. Generations of young people, one after another, matriculated through this material… and hopefully onto better things. Although many of the offerings were retreads, once the Dime Novels gained retail shelf space, new material began to filter in which shared the same presentation.

These new dime novels were character magazines and a raft of publications which resembled the sleazy end of the Story Paper spectrum. The character magazines were something of a continuation on a theme which had emerged in story papers, of a series of super heroes (boy detectives, boy inventors, boy explorers) whose exploits appeared month after month. Anthologies of children’s literature, short prose and pen activities, also came to filter in. And all of this came to share space with adult Joke Books, all occupying the same unsorted pile.

And then came Jesse James. Obviously Jesse James was a real criminal.  Character magazines featuring this outlaw began showing up with the other Dime Novels. These magazines did not cling to the outlaw’s actual exploits and were actually an attempt to graft the true crime exploitation trend to the character magazine format. While the real Jesse James was hardly a choirboy, fictional Jesse James was a monster capable of any act of depravity. He will tear off the arms of his enemies and then use those limbs as lethal weapons.  This adult-oriented, editorially unhinged presentation was followed up by offerings about other outlaws, most notably Billy the Kid.

The trend came to taint the reputation of the Dime Novel field. It also extended the format’s lifespan. Violence, lawlessness, substance abuse and tawdry behavior of all types were glorified in the new character novels, especially the ones featuring out west outlaws. It must have caught on, since there was a steady stream of the stuff right until the end. School teachers hated Dime Novels, specifically the new character magazines. It wasn’t so much content that was being objected to, but rather the use of language. Whereas the earlier Dime Novels were written in regulation 4^th Grade English, the character magazines were not as meticulously edited and put pride of place to slang. As opposed to dooming the field, the negative attention seems to have driven sales.

I should also note that there was a trend in proto-magazines which had cropped up at about the same time as these last wave Dime Novels were coming into the fold. It had started as a trend in literary magazines, spread to the remaining sleaze merchants and spawned a trend in periodicals aimed at homemakers. So there were magazine-like things in the marketplace well before actual magazines showed up. What the ratio was between Dime Novels and the other publications has been lost to history.

What eventually killed the Dime Novel format, which had arguably been around since colonial times, was the rise of press batteries specifically designed to manufacture standard sized magazines. Standardization was the key to industrialization in all manufacturing—and magazine production was no different. Almost all magazines of the time resembled what National Geographic looks like today.  Although set up for litho stock, seeding in folios of lesser grade material was a well accommodated economy method. At a certain print run, it was far cheaper to produce periodicals in the magazine format than it was in the antiquated dime novel configuration. Moreover, the magazine format had become the configuration most preferred by consumers.

So the Dime Novels ported over into pulp. Originally the pulp format was the home to a class of escapist fiction later branded as Fantasy, Science Fiction and Horror. This mix was then joined by the material which had transitioned from the dime novels. The offerings ranged in levels of taste, but there was always a solid undercard of prurient scum. It was a haven for a class of publishers who were willing to do anything for a buck.

The pulps were big business from the onset. A succession of industry leaders defended the pulp turf from government regulation. The pulps were also cash cows and the major publishers were quick to spend their loot, hoovering up more respectable real estate throughout the publishing spectrum. It was a turnover in the ownership of the publishing industry, with the pulp magnates taking the lead. They owned the book publishers. They owned newspapers. They pushed their wares onto the radio. Even the mom and pop operators were tied into this pulp establishment. This establishment held sway in both the Progressive and Conservative wings of the Republican Party. Not that any serious censorship effort was ever raised up, but it would have faced powerful opposition. The pulp universe remained a free market throughout its heyday.

They were on the receiving end of a few governmental brush back pitches, however. As with the wild west outlaws, pulps were quick to launch titles glorifying the exploits Prohibition Era mobsters. Largely a trend of lesser publishers, it even subdivided into a genre covering the lifestyles of Gun Molls.

More than one publisher received a “knock it off” visit from the FBI. And the trend was snuffed out, nearly overnight. Many of the gang titles converted into fictional promotion arms for the feds. The personal touch works!

In the late 1930s porn publisher Culture Publications faced a ban on the distribution of its magazines within the borders of New York City. As with many smut publishers, Culture manufactured clean versions of their magazines for circulation to the newsstand market. Essentially they just took the smutty pictures out and sold the contents as another magazine.  Normally the publisher would change the cover and tone down the illustrations and maybe retitle the clean version. In this case, Culture didn’t do as thorough of a cleaning as they should have.

This is the cover that got Culture in trouble. Mayor La Guardia spotted this at his local newsstand while on his way to work one morning and flipped out. Unfortunately for Culture, they were produced in New York, meaning that the ban put them immediately out of business. Culture moved two blocks away and changed their brand from Spicy to Speed and continued publishing soon afterward. Today the firm is known as DC Comics.  

That was it for censorship. The pulp fiction publishers faced far more official scrutiny over their tendency to use unattributed reprints than they ever did from content issues. As pulp magazines became less broadly popular, they became more prone to catering to niche  tastes. This trend started early on and then began progressing, until the entire pulp field was dominated by off center presentations.  The pulp magazine format was also under pressure from market and technological forces.

Paper shortages brought on by WWII caused a contraction of the overall pulp market. The artificial scarcity of paper—really a government mandated overvaluing of the paper commodity—pressed the publishers to ply more value added presentations. The two big spinoffs from industry experimentation brought on by the paper rationing regime were comic books and paperbacks. Comic Books went on to become their own medium, although they carried heavy pulp baggage at the onset. The true further development of pulp fiction was actually carried on in paperback form.

Sort of. The paperbacks did not appear standardized, did not emerge fully formed like Venus on the half shell to replace the pulps. There was an entire non standard era in paperbacks, starting with WWII and ending in the middle 1950s. The paperback as a set and identifiable mass market item did not gain traction until the later 1950s. And even at their height, paperbacks only had a fraction of the draw that the pulps enjoyed.

The early period paperbacks are referred to as digests. All of them are in a form similar to Reader’s Digest, which is a format that has been popular since that magazine gained traction. This format occasionally has increased attractiveness, especially when printing costs, postage rates and paper prices are particularly high. The entire WWII era in digests is something of a replay of the Dime Novel era. As with that era, many of the digest titles were issued as numbers of a periodical series, even though each issue was a standalone novel. Much of what appeared in digest form were in two mainstream genres, Detective Mystery and Western. Unlike the Dime Novels, much of what appeared in digest form was either recycled from the pulps or condensed from popular genre hard bound books. That said, what was driving this market were original short novels—all of it over the top sleaze. The digests were a sea of wanton sex and drug use.

We touched briefly on the secondary distribution system deployed by the sleazy area of the pulp publishing universe.  Most pulp magazines were distributed by several syndicates. In the over the counter market, the end users are reached though newsstands, grocery stores, drug stores and, to a lesser extent, bookstores. This is largely a consignment market; wherein no one actually gets paid anything until the magazine is sold. The retailer makes his nut at the time of sale, the distributor gets his when returns are counted and finally the publisher is paid, when the distributor feels like it—generally a three-month lag time. In the truly classic set up, the printer then gets paid. This is a fine system as long as all parties have operating capital and credit, money to run until you make money. The under the counter market is entirely different. First, there is no trust, there is no credit. Our publisher pays the writer, the cover artist and the printer. Then he invites in jobbers. The jobbers are the distributors here, many of them with a sideline that will take them into various stores. The jobbers take the stuff with them on their rounds, offering sales of a carton of digests at one set price. (If the jobber doesn’t eventually sell it, he brings it back to the publisher.) The retailer buys the entire carton at one price. And he eats the loss if it doesn’t sell. It’s a cut throat system with a lot of mark up imbedded to offset the risks.

The WWII era paper shortages, lingering credit issues and gas rationing created a climate favoring the under the counter distribution system. Even before the war, pulps were starting to lose their newsstand, dime store and department store distribution outlets. (Grocery stores never handled pulps.) The digests moved in tandem with girlie magazines into the traditional under the counter markets, but also expanded out to such non-traditional venues as gas stations, card stores and the emerging convenience store market. 

During WWII pulps had cut their cover prices, but retained their typical dimensions. Those pulps which had the connections to continue publishing were plodding along with cover prices of typically 10 to 25 cents. All magazines were operating under price controls at the time. Digests were an unregulated sector and were free to price themselves at whatever the market would tolerate. They typically went for 25 to 30 cents—and were about one fourth of the price of a pulp to produce. And while pulps became somewhat rare during the war, digests were plentiful and growing. They continued to grow even after the war, at least through the end of the flash Depression of the late 1940s.

Whatever its other drawbacks are, the under the counter market is extremely efficient. It has a very fast feedback loop. The publishers knew what was selling in short order. This market led with smut. Much of it, it should be said, was aimed at a female audience. Fiction featuring wanton promiscuity had been a staple of the pulps and the private lending library market for decades. While the pulp offerings had mostly followed the very libertine conventions of Flapper Fiction, the new digests had an emphasis on deviant sexuality, homosexuality and drug use. Once wartime conditions ended, many publishers anticipated a new direction for the pulps.

Drug stores started getting into the act. By the late 1940s the drug stores had become the primary outlets for the digests—as they were for comic books and pulps and tabloids. This drug store chain acceptance could be considered one of the driving forces in the broadening out of the genres away from smut and into Detective Mystery and Western. Or it is more likely that the drug stores simply wanted in on an emerging high mark-up product line. The publication history of the digests suggests that they had started offerings in the other two genres while still in non-traditional sales venues.  Digests or something digest-like looked like it was going to be the wave of the future.

Paper and credit shortages, however, were the real factors holding the digest market together. Once the paper came back, all of the publishers moved on to better things. Two major publishers emerged out of the digest boom, Avon and Hillman. Both had some pre-digest ventures, but this market is where they made their bones, especially Hillman. Pulp publishers Ace, the Thrilling Group and Columbia Publications (Archie Comics) dabbled in the market for as long as they had to. Martin Goodman (Marvel Comics), Lev Gleason (publisher of the million selling comic book Crime Does Not Pay) and various associates of Lev Gleason were the digest market’s mainstays, producing between their imprints half off all the digest field. There were very few operators who seemed to be in digests exclusively, and all of them were smut slingers. The all-fiction digest market’s originator, venerable right wing publisher American Mercury, largely went by the wayside—although its offerings were the first to dent the drug store market. By the time the actual paperback emerged as an identifiable product, American Mercury was done as a going concern.

All of this would seem to be leading up to the introduction of the paperback as the fiction vehicle of the new age. Except that it didn’t happen. Everyone who surged into paperbacks at the end of the war soon threw in the towel, including Martin Goodman. (Goodman was the most influential publisher in the digest field.)  When the paper came back, the digests died, except for the smut, which continued in its non-standard sales areas. Eventually the smut digests converted into paperback form.

Not that there was a shortage of smut in the new magazines. With the war’s close, magazines plying the pulp’s core genres swept back into the market. These genres were highly influenced by what had been proven in the digests, leading to the Golden Age of Scum. By the middle 1950s all of the pulp titles which had vanished with the war were back on the stands. Actual pulp magazines came back, although it was their last stand.

The pulp format was now on its sixth decade.  New efficient presses, allowing for shorter runs and less expensive set up, became the norm. And the entire magazine industry had become less standardized.  By the time the pulps reappeared, they were one of a handful of publications still using the old configuration. Many of the continuing pulp titles, including the pulp’s flagship Argosy, switched to photo offset or litho stock. The titles themselves started to switch focus. Argosy, which had started as an all-fiction magazine, switched to true crime and sensation. Blue Book, once a theatrical news peddler turned all-fiction litho, came to ply men’s adventure and eventually gay lifestyle offerings. That said, most of the magazines inhabiting the Golden Age of Scum shelf space were entirely new publications. As was typical of the pulp retail space when the market is healthy, there were an enormous variety of titles present, all offered in limited quantity. You might have 200 plus titles on any drug store magazine rack, all available in quantities of between 3 and 25 copies each. That was the set up that pays in pulp land and it was a draw and cash cow for the drug stores from the 1940s through the early 1970s.

This Golden Age of Scum reached its zenith in the 1950s and 1960s.  Flagship titles of this era included Confidential, Playboy, True and the National Enquirer. None of these offerings are what one might call ‘mainstream’. We normally think of this era as being one of staid, homogenized conformity, especially in major media forms. And it was. Yet thriving in their own parallel continuum was a counter cultural spectrum in magazine form. It was the full flowering of a trend which had started decades before.

From the 1930s on, the pulps were not mainstream. They weren’t going for the sensible, staid crowd at all. They held onto their shelf space by being Illicit-Lite—too bloody for the newspaper, too graphic for the movies, too bawdy for the hard bounds—and willing to take chances on off track genres like Science Fiction and Horror. During the pulp’s reign there were no horror novels. It existed in pulp form and in the movies—with the movies being the tamer form. They had two brands of Romance, Flapper Fiction and True Confessions, which didn’t appear in print anywhere else. They lost some of their forms as time went on—the hard boiled detective, the super hero and eventually space opera science fiction—but the other forms they held onto, simply because no other medium would touch them.

Being fringe-worthy did have its downside. As with any mass form, most of the pulp universe was pure schlock. A lot of it was produced simply to be shocking and not much else.  In the 1950s there was an overabundance of official nitpicking pointed at the pulp medium. As long as what you were producing wasn’t ‘kid’s stuff’ public sentiment wasn’t likely to turn on you. This was the downfall of the comic books. In the end, however, it was the drug industry versus the bible thumpers, with a predictable result. Big pharma won.

Pulp publishers had been using the bible thumpers as foils for years. Harold Hersey recounts in his book that he directed his distribution staff to alert conservative church leaders whenever he was about to send out objectionable material. Apparently as far back as the 1930s, being condemned from certain pulpits was good for drumming up interest.   Many publishers produced titles with trick covers. When arranged a certain way on the stands, the combined cover illustrations would produce an image far more ‘exciting’ than anything found in the individual magazine’s pages. All of these attention getting stunts had something of a rouge slant.  Drug stores were particularly good at playing this up. During the Golden Age of Scum, the drug stores segregated their magazine racks, much in the same way video stores used to wall off their adult movies.

All of this attention was good for sales, but it fed a parade of official scrutiny. From the late 1940s through the end of the 1950s publishers within the ‘pulp sphere’ were hauled up before various committees of Congress. Much of this came to a crescendo with the comic book hearings. As a result, Comic Books became tame to the point of near extinction. The rest of the pulp universe didn’t miss a sleazy beat. In fact, the height of official scrutiny coincided with the magazine’s post WWII apex in popularity. Counter-culture was extremely popular.

This seems is stark contrast with the thorough deodorization sweeping movies and the emerging medium of television at the time. Prior to the war, the bullet riddled bodies of mobsters often appeared on newspapers. During the war dead and disfigured corpses were commonplace newsreel images. There had been a creeping acceptance of human sexuality from the 1920s on.

Suddenly, the 1950s hits and the cowboys are shooting guns out of people’s hands, bullet wounds don’t gush blood. married couples are depicted as sleeping in separate beds, spoken language is bled of its four color slang, politics became genteel and the newspapers began merely alluding to events they would have described with vivid detail in decades previous. What happened?

The Depression was a long slog which ended in a nightmare of bloodletting on a global scale. And the end of WWII did not bring instant prosperity. For a time it looked as if the bad news had not ended. During this transition period there emerged two broad trends in popular escapism. One was towards an agnostic relativism, cynicism dressed in detached pseudo-scientific babble. You can see this trend doing track work with the noir movies. It often paraded itself about as realism. The other trend was that popular entertainment should be about wish fulfillment, positive aspiration. Wishes should be happy.   

There were also a large number of toddlers suddenly present. Breeders and their broods were in the majority. Mass mediums of all kinds became baby proofed. There should be nothing unpleasant bleating in the presence of spawn whose parents liberated the world. The people have spoken. Disneyland wins.

Comic books got nailed because they were viewed as kid’s stuff.  As harsh and over the top as efforts directed against comic books may seem, the net result did not carry the force of law. The comic book publishers agreed that they were primarily a children’s medium and decided to adopt editorial standards in line with that. When the titles staying in pulp magazine format came to be boycotted, it had nothing to do with content. To make a long story short, pulp magazines took up twice the shelf space as the standard photo offset magazine, with no better mark up. So they had to go. Pulp fiction continued on—many of the same titles continued on—but the format was kaput. Compounding the situation further, many of the large publishers decided to flood the market with new titles in the mid-1950s. The drug stores responded to the new influx of titles by shortening the shelf life of the magazines already on their racks. At the height, new stuff came in and old stuff went out, resulting in the magazines receiving only a week or so in sales exposure. This inevitably is what killed the Golden Goose of the Golden Age of Scum.

Killed is perhaps too big of a word. It left the drug stores. Pulp fiction continued. It was just no longer as centrally located. To this date there are still some pulp like titles available at drug stores.

None of it has ever been censored. The United States is an “Enlightenment” country. It is centered on an Enlightenment Era document which enshrines freedom of the press. The culture is specifically reverent of the printed word. In general, the public takes a “if you can reach up to the bar, you’re old enough to drink” approach to printed materials. Disputes as to the quality of printed materials only come into play when public funds are involved. Most of these center on library acquisitions and almost all of them are politically motivated. There have been numerous efforts to ban the works of Mark Twain from inclusion on library shelves, but none directed against such pulp luminaries as H.P. Lovecraft and Earl Stanley Gardner.

Of course, few pulp magazines were ever a part of any library’s collection. Little pulp fiction got into libraries on the first bounce. By the time Lovecraft and Gardner and hundreds of other’s works made it to your library, it was nicely clad in hardbound covers and simply labeled as fiction. Mark Twain merits the occasional bouts of political ire because his works mean something.  Boobies, crooks, monsters and UFOs are nice draws for eyeballs, but are fairly meaningless. From the classical censor’s standpoint, pulp fiction isn’t worth the lead to shoot. And that’s perhaps for the best.

Note: I’ve painted with a fairly broad brush here and still went over 5000 words. My sole intention was to explain what the market was like and why censorship efforts newer took a serious foothold. I have made a few generalizations in the interest of brevity.

We’ve let a few topics slide in since our last posting. The next few topics will be a bit more contemporary.

As always, your feedback is invited.