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Paperback readers ...
... and pulp magazine aficionados, let the browsing begin. The Vintage Paperback and Pulp Show offers great gleaning for readers seeking goosebumps.
By MICHAEL CANNING
© St. Petersburg Times, published February 1, 2001
What would you do if your most ready sources of lurid melodrama and creepy science fiction didn't exist? It's hard to imagine, but somehow, folks did manage to get by before the advent of Jerry Springer and X-Files.
Florida's fifth annual Vintage Paperback and Pulp Show will show how many Americans found escape before the advent, or at least preeminence, of television. From 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday, dealers from around the country will converge on the Science building of Hillsborough Community College's Dale Mabry Campus to buy, sell and trade pulp magazines and titles from the golden age of paperbacks.
That age occurred in the '40s and '50s.
"The first pocket books appeared around 1939 with The Good Earth by Pearl Buck," said show organizer Angelo Rescinitin, "and it started a revolution in publishing, putting 25 cent paperbacks in the hands of everybody."
Pulp magazines are a different medium, though commonly traded at shows alongside classic paperbacks. The publishing world's equivalent to the B horror or action movie, they were characterized by lurid, seedy stories, written with questionable skill, and vivid color cover art that was sensationalistic and risque.
"And they were printed on the cheapest, cheapest paper one could possibly find," added Resciniti, hence the term "pulp." "They featured on the covers all the artists and writers that were appearing in that issue, usually with cover art that was as sensationalistic as the local law would allow," he said with chuckle. "The bug-eyed monsters in the science-fiction magazines and scantily clad girls: definitely not politically correct."
The golden age of pulp magazines was the '20s and '30s, and tracing the genre's prominence, along with that of the classic paperbacks, illuminates the arc of American society and culture itself.
Phillip Sipiora, a professor of English at the University of South Florida, isn't surprised that the pulps peaked when they did. "If you look at the '20s as a time of excess and exuberance in the Jazz Age setting the stage for the depression in the '30s," he said, "then in some ways the kinds of monstrous distortions (of pulp fiction) were part of that escapism from bleak reality."
Sipiora added that the hard economic times of the Great Depression, not to mention the political paranoia of that decade's red scare, made the escapist element of pulp appealing. "The intense fear of communism, wide scale investigations at many levels, Hollywood was intimidated: These issues were in the air at the time, and in a sense could have played a role in shaping the fiction of the time, the disposable pulp."
The economic explosion after World War II and increased transience of the country's population brought about the rise of paperback books, and ushered out pulp magazines.
"The migration after the war," said Sipiora, "both intra-country and into the country, I think created the conditions that were ripe for paperback books to be consumed -- soldiers on trains coming home, major migration from the South to the North."
Resciniti said increased air travel at the dawn of the jet age also helped make the paperback a dominant format.
"I would think that some of the most popular newsstands were in airports, where people wanted a nice two- or three-hour read and didn't want to worry about damaging a beautiful hard-back copy."
A tip for speculators: Resciniti says now is a good time to buy at the pulp and paperback shows. "There were a couple of times when the hobby kind of spiked around the publication of price guides (in the early '80s). A lot of hard-core collectors say that the books are really underpriced right now, and when and if someone comes out with a price guide, the prices should go up."
Resciniti estimated that a third of the stock at the show will cost $1 or less. Most of the rest should go for about $3 to $5. But a small margin, about three to five percent, will be considered rare and will fetch prices over $100. Among those: original paperback editions from mystery detective masters Jim Thompson and David Goodis, plus paperbacks by New Wave science fiction dean Harlan Ellison.
At a glance:
WHAT: Florida's fifth annual Vintage Paperback and Pulp Show
WHEN: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday WHERE: Hillsborough Community College, Dale Mabry Campus, Science building
COST: Free admission
CALL: (813) 657-0094
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