Above, four issues of the weekly pulp magazine Argosy from 1937 through 1940 with three covers from Rudolph Belarski and one from Marshall Frantz, plus early fiction from L. Ron Hubbard. These all came courtesy of our friends over at National Road Books, whose store you can visit via the little linkee here. 

Courtesy of National Road Books, we have another sleaze pulp today—Spankers Anonymous, which is a purported case study of America’s spanking culture by Dr. Gerda Mundinger. The good doctor was in reality sleaze author Paul Hugo Little, who we think kind of dropped the ball on his pseudonym. It’s a spanking book, Paul. Why didn’t you go with Sawyer B. Hind or Hugh Jass? Hell, even something a bit more esoteric like Dick Mussell or Pat Hiscock would have worked too. What a missed opportunity. Anyway, we’ll tell you more about Paul Little later. As for his book, since it’s all about spanking we think it’s best to just show you its rear end. See below.

The guys at National Road Books have fed us more scans from their large Argosy collection, and above are five from 1938 through 1940. In these issues there’s fiction from Max Brand, C.S. Forester, and a raft of capable in-house writers. The cover art is from Rudolph Belarski (panels one and two), G.J. Rosen (three and four), and Emmett Watson (five). After two years of finding almost nothing from Argosy suddenly we have a pipeline into a treasure trove thanks to NRB and we’re ecstatic, because Argosy was the first real pulp magazine, launched on a $500 budget by Frank A. Munsey in 1882. The venture wasn’t an instant success. Munsey had conceived a children’s publication and that version of Argosy went bust immediately. But Munsey managed to keep ownership of the idea and kept publishing on a shoestring budget. As he learned the market, he realized a children’s magazine wasn’t the direction he wanted to continue. By fits and starts, he began shifting from young readers to pulp fiction and eventually transformed the magazine into an American staple that lasted until 1978. We’ll have more on Munsey’s publishing adventures later. Got any pulp treasures of your own? Feel free to do what National Road Books did and use the pulp uploader in our sidebar. Our mailbox is always open.