Danger Is My Business

San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1993. 1st. Softcover. Very Good/None. Softcover, 144 pages. An illustrated history of the fabulous pulp magazines from 1896 to 1953. After tracing the birth of the pulps back to the 1882 launching of Golden Argosy magazine, printed on pulpwood pages, Server organizes his unwieldy subject into categories of pulps: adventure, romance and sex, horror and fantasy, private eye, weird menace, science fiction. Each receives a lively capsule history that covers trends, reader (and sometimes, as in the case of the ``Spicys,'' government) response, and writers' bios--which, though sketchy (Hammett's Hollywood experience gets one sentence), resurrect a number of relatively obscure but seminal and fascinating figures, like Conan- creator Robert E. Howard, who shot himself dead at age 30 on the day his mother died, and Frederick Faust (a.k.a. Max Brand), who sometimes wrote around the clock, piling up two or three million words a year. Server attributes the pulps' demise to, among other factors, the advent of TV, paperbacks, and comic books, and he winds up with a note on pulp-collecting. For all of the author's savvy, though, it's above all the eye- popping illustrations (100 color, 57 b&w) that will have readers beaming. Magazine covers (some lurid, some of eerie beauty), sample pages of text and ads (``Raise Giant Frogs'')--the pulps come alive once again here, in all their eccentric glory. Record # 361963