A complete, restored issue of Pulp Fiction from 1881 — all 16 pages of painted-cover fiction magazines that launched science fiction, horror, and hardboiled crime, free to page through at ComicBooks.com.

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A complete issue · 16 pages · 1881

Beadle's Half Dime Library No. 189

1881 · Free to read

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About this issue

This issue of Beadle and Adams Weekly (March 8, 1881) contains "Bob Rockett, the Cracksman; or, Driven to the Wall" by Charles Morris, part of a serial featuring the protagonist. The story opens in Little Rock, Arkansas, where Bob Rockett, a well-dressed New Yorker, meets Marie Delorme at a hotel. She invites him to call, and that evening he discovers she and her "cousin" George Anderson are con artists running a confidence scheme. They lure him into a card game of brag, betting escalating stakes. Concurrently, the narrative shifts to New York, where Grace Garland and her fiancé Paul Essex remain uncertain whether her former husband George Delorme still lives. Paul departs for Nashville to investigate Delorme's fate. The reader learns that Delorme, actually alive, is George Anderson—the man now fleecing Bob Rockett in Arkansas.

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Each page has its own page — the cartoon, who’s in it, and what the satire means.