If my kids read that headline, first thing they would ask would be: “What’s a Sears, Roebuck catalog?” But that’s another story.
Back in the late 1990s when we were living in the Tampa Bay area, I first visited pulp dealer David Alexander’s Tampa warehouse. It was the largest single collection of pulps I’d ever seen. The warehouse housed not only the pulps he had for sale, but also books, movie memorabilia, etc.
Beside the rows of shelved pulps, what really caught my attention were the monsters high on a shelf to the right.
The pulps I was familiar with were of the standard half-inch thick, around 128-page variety. What were these behemoths?
Turns out they were quarterly editions of science fiction pulps.
Can you imagine plunking down your 50 cents and hauling home a nearly 2-inch-thick collection of outlandish entertainment? That would last a kid days.
Years later I broke down and bought one of the monsters – the Winter 1950 number of Amazing Stories Quarterly — and discovered the secret. It wasn’t some fantastically large single issue; it was actually three unsold monthly issues – June, July and August 1950 – glued together to form a single magazine. The only thing missing were the front and back covers of the individual magazines.
For a 50-cent cover price you got 75-cents worth of pulp science fiction. Would you have waited for the quarterly to save a quarter?
– William
The funny thing is that there were actually pulps that were the size of a Sears catalog and I’m not talking about three unsold issues glued together.
MAMMOTH DETECTIVE, MAMMOTH MYSTERY, MAMMOTH WESTERN, MAMMOTH ADVENTURE, sometimes reached an obscene size that is hard to believe. And some of it was actually readable!