Halfway through the Research Marathon.

[ratmmjess]

You'll have noticed that I stopped doing the pulp market share posts.

The reason for this is that I discovered that my master list of pulps I was using for the market share data was...embarrassingly...incomplete. I say "embarrassingly" because I took it almost entirely from my Pulp Magazine Holdings Directory, which I'd thought was exhaustive

Comments

thousands, literally thousands...

[magscanner]

Well, hundreds, of spicy titles. But I think a lot of them only published a few issues. General form: Real New Spicy [noun] Tales.

What was the new source of data? 5000+ is a lot of pulps.

Mike

Re: thousands, literally thousands...

[ratmmjess]

5000+ magazines, not pulps--Galactic Central's masterlist, and then the Pulp Trader's masterlist.

[richardthinks]

I think I have a friend who'd be interested in the true crime pulps.Do you know how far circulation reached for these things - are you dealing principally with US/Europe? Specifically, any Thai pulps?

[ratmmjess]

Absolutely no idea about circulation, though I'd imagine they went as far as GIs went. I really know very little about the true crime pulps--not an area I ever investigated before now.

I'd say Thai pulps, from what I know, evolved independently from 1910s or so based on dime novels. I know very little about their contents, though as a general rule the pulps of the colonized were more limited than the pulps of the colonizers.

(I have a blog post in mind entitled Notes Toward A Book I'll Never write, comparing frontier literature across cultures. Thai lit is included there).

[anonymous]

How "true" were the "true crime" pulps? In other words, were they really just another form of detective pulps?

Cambias

[ratmmjess]

We would now say, "based on true events," for loose values of "based." Sometimes very loose.

(I think the true pulps were where the "nonfiction novel" got its start, rather than anything Capote did).