The Magnet 30: The Pulp Magazine Archive
EPHEMERA
The Pulp Magazine Archive
The Internet Archive’s The Pulp Magazine Archive has downloadable scans of 13,559 pulp magazines from the 20th century. They range from romance to science fiction. Some aren’t really pulp magazines in the traditional sense, like Hollywood gossip magazines, but everything is interesting. I am fascinated by the design, the typography, the illustrations, the stories and articles, and the ads. The people who upload the titles often provide entertaining and interesting descriptions of the individual issues. There’s truly a lifetime worth of study here!
A small sampling:
Look (1937)
Every issue of Look magazine had hundreds of photographs of unusual and remarkable people, animals, things, and places. I wish it was still being published – I’d subscribe!
Look at this crazy freckle-removing process:
Mediascene (1974)
Comic book artist Jim Steranko, known for his highly stylized work in Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., published and edited this beautifully designed newsprint magazine devoted to “comics, films, paperbacks, undergrounds, TV, pulps.” What’s not to love? I have a few issues in my collection.
Johnson Smith Catalog (1979)
Getting a new Johnson Smith Catalog in the mail when I was a kid was an absolute thrill. Each issue was over 100 pages, and each page was loaded with marvelous novelties and gadgets and magic tricks and other things you couldn't find in any store.
Super-Science Fiction(1959)
From the 1930s to the 1960s, newsstands were filled with dozens of science fiction titles. People had an insatiable appetite for bug-eyed monsters, space creatures, radioactive monsters, and science experiments gone awry. This issue of a lesser-known title called Super-Science Fiction has a cover by Kelly Freas, a story by Robert Silverberg, and as a one-page “feature” article called “Nuclear News,” which I’ve transcribed for your reading pleasure:
Nuclear News
by Steven Rory
A weird garden of mutated plants at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island offers a foretaste of what an Earth devastated by atomic energy may look like. The ten-acre tract, closely guarded, is in its tenth year of use. It features a long cylinder of radioactive Cobalt-60 that is lowered into the ground for several hours each day, showering the nearby plants with 2000-curie gamma rays that induce the genetic changes known as mutations.
Several useful plant mutations have resulted, though most of the garden’s plants are biological monstrosities. Among the useful mutants are a bushy type of navy bean that is resistant to disease and easier to harvest; a strain of oat resistant to the costly rust disease; and a hardy, short stemmed rice plant. A strain of peach trees that ripens two weeks earlier than normal, and one that ripens two weeks later than normal, have also been produced.
But most of the crop is strange and bizarre. In a wedge-shaped bed of gladioluses, those nearest the gamma-source (which would kill a human being four feet away within an hour) are dwarfed to one-eighth normal size. Tobacco plants grow with cord-like, stringy leaves in the Brookhaven garden. Some other plants bear little resemblance to their non-mutated originals.
The purpose of the Atomic Energy Commission-sponsored garden is to develop beneficial mutants for the improvement of agriculture. More than 150 plant breeders and geneticists are taking part in the radiation experiments.
I just learned that “atomic gardening” was popular in the 1950s, and Brookhaven National Laboratory really did have a radioactive plant-breeding program. The 99% Invisible podcast did an episode about atomic gardening in 2017.
If you find a gem in The Pulp Magazine Archive, please share it in the comments.
CLOTHES
The Magnet mascot shirts
The Magnet’s mascot is a little creature with a horseshoe magnet head. It’s wearing a smock that says “mysterious stone,” which is the old Japanese word for “magnet.” Because of popular demand, I’m selling another batch of Magnet mascot shirts in various styles. To keep the shirts mysterious, there are no other markings on them other than the mascot image.
I am way too easily grabbed by this stuff and possibly have too much of it around me already. What really caught my eye in that Mediascene was the original Octobriana comics shown along with all these other super women. Jim Rugg recently did a new black light Octobriana comic that is some serious awesomesauce.