[It’s much easier to search than to research :-). And in that spirit of summer laziness, here’s a quick roundup of pulp links from around the web.]
Weird Tales might be dead, but research into it is still going on today. And funded at a university too…courtesy the University of Arkansas.
John Locke of Off-Trail Publications gave an interview about Margie Harris, the queen of the gangster pulps.
A new book recently came out on modernism and the use of street slang in American writing. This interview with the book’s author covers Dashiell Hammett’s writing and correspondence, and a file of underworld slang found in his papers stored at the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas in Austin.
Book here (disable ad-blocker to see the link):
More academic research on the pulps. A call for papers on “The Age of the Pulps: the SF magazine, 1926–1960”, from Maynooth University, Ireland.
Someone discovered a cache of pulp magazines under the floor boards of a house being demolished in Australia. Has anyone here made a find like this? Leave a note in the comments…
And finally, the weird art of Mexican pulps…
In the 1970's Gordon Huber stumbled across an old house about to be demolished in the Akron, Ohio area. The cellar had several stacks of pulps but he was too big to fit through the cellar window. But his young son could squeeze through and brought out many pulps including a hundred or so DIME DETECTIVES that he sold to me.
Gordon told me this story a few years ago at Pulpcon. By this time he was around 90 years old and being helped around the dealer's room by his grown son. The son admitted to me that he was the little boy who squeezed into the cellar that time so many years ago.
I have close to a hundred pieces of Mexican pulp art, many with the paperback books that the cover art appeared on. Practically no one is presently interested in the art but I like it because it is very macabre and colorful with strange images.
I got most of the pieces from a collector who lived near the Mexican border and used to go to the many flea markets. Evidently an entire warehouse of this art was dumped on the flea markets and he managed to buy hundreds of pieces. But like I said, it is so strange that I have yet to find anyone else who collects it. I'll have to show you the stacks I have of the art the next time you visit. There is a book called Mexican Pulp Art that you might want to look at.
Now that's a fine find.