There were literally hundreds of such often live-by-night magazines with wildly exotic and frequently misleading names from their initial appearance at the beginning of the 1920’a in America. And I would not pretend that everything they published was made of gold. Far from it. We are talking commercial fiction, mostly catering to the lowest common denominator. But then do our modern paperbacks have loftier ambitions and superior hit-rate, quality-wise?

But what makes them stand out is the fact that the pulps had one golden rules which unsung editors insisted upon and good and bad writers alike religiously followed: adherence to the art of storytelling. Every story in the pulps had a beginning and and end, sharply-etched economical characterization, action, emotions, plenty going on. The mission was to keep the reader hooked, to transport him/her into a more interesting world of fantasy and make-believe, spiriting them away from the drab horizons of everyday life (remember, there was no television in those very early days,or CDs or other modern leisure addictions).