Quentin Tarantino's working title for Pulp Fiction was Black Mask, a nod to the violent 1920s detective magazine, and this episode explores how the disposable pulp magazines of the 1890s through the 1950s became the blueprint for modern entertainment. We start with the physical object: seven by ten inches, roughly 128 pages of untrimmed, highly acidic wood pulp paper that flakes into brown dust today, and trace the lineage from Newgate novels and penny dreadfuls to Frank Munsey's 1896 revamp of Argosy, a 135,000-word brick of text with no illustrations that reached half a million copies a month.

We look at Street and Smith's color covers, the serialization of H. Rider Haggard's Ayesha that seeded the lost-world genre behind Tarzan and Conan, and the golden age when 150 titles fought for attention on newsstands. We examine the economics of p ...