The Argosy, Vol. 65

About this issue

This interior page — not a painted cover but a letterpress title opening — represents The Argosy at the precise moment Frank Munsey's weekly was transforming American publishing. Printed on cheap wood-pulp paper and sold for a dime, The Argosy is widely credited as the first true pulp magazine. This January 1898 issue opens F. M. F. Skene's serial 'A Noble Life,' illustrated with a small portrait photograph of Mrs. Rangabé. No lurid cover painting yet — that visual grammar was still crystallizing — but the dense, column-set fiction inside, mixing adventure, sentiment, and biography, established the all-fiction format that later pulps would weaponize with painted gore and rocket ships to invent science fiction, weird horror, and hardboiled crime wholesale.