Pulpwood Days, Vol 1: Editors You Want To Know

by John Locke (editor)

A collection of articles from writer's magazines in the Pulp Era (1920-1960) by and about pulp magazine editors. Articles are supplemented by ample biographical material. Includes photos/illustrations, and a complete index. Among the many editors covered are Farnsworth Wright (Weird Tales), Carson Mowre (Dell), Ray Palmer (Amazing Stories), Harold Hersey (Gangster Stories), Freeman H. Hubbard (Railroad Stories), W. Adolphe Roberts (Brief Stories), Frank E. Blackwell (Detective Story), and Daisy Bacon (Love Story).

184 pages, Paperback

First published March 7, 2007

About the author

John Locke is a historian of the American pulp fiction magazines of the first half of the Twentieth Century. He has paid particular attention to the phenomenon of pulp fiction as a writers’ paradise in the boom years of the twenties, to its sudden downfall after the Crash of ’29 into a writers’ ghetto where writers were forced to pound out “speed art” on their typewriters at a penny a word in order to make a living. One of the central characters that evolved in the pulps is the hardboiled detective, in magazines like Black Mask and Dime Detective; the central character behind the scenes of the 1930s pulps is the hardboiled writer, a Manhattan denizen thriving on booze and cigarettes, using a typewriter like it was a machine gun, and slowly going nuts. Locke has explored the pulp writing phenomenon in three key works: Pulp Fictioneers (2004), Pulpwood Days: Volume 1: Editors You Want To Know (2007), and Pulpwood Days: Volume 2: Lives of the Pulp Writers (2013).

Locke’s Off-Trail Publications specializes in books which combine vintage pulp fiction reprints with related histories of the era, the authors and the magazines. Gang Pulp is a pioneering look at the violent gangster fiction that came into vogue during the last years of Prohibition. Single author gangster collections include: If She Only Had a Machine Gun , by Richard Credicott (2011); Queen of the Gangsters: Volume 1: Broadwalk Empire , by Margie Harris (2011); and The Gangland Sagas of Big Nose Serrano , by Anatole Feldman, introductions by Will Murray, Volumes 1-3 (2008-09). City of Numbered Men: The Best of Prison Stories (2010) explores the brief reign of hardboiled prison fiction, and includes a 14,000-word profile of Harold Hersey, the most colorful publisher of the pulp era.

Adventure fiction collections include two volumes from Africa explorer Charles Beadle: The City of Baal (2007), and The Land of Ophir (2012); the exquisite Amazon Stories, Volume 1 (2008) and Volume 2 (2009), by Arthur O. Friel; Outdoor Stories , by J. Allan Dunn (2011); and The Golden Anaconda , by Elmer Brown Mason (2009).

Weird detective collections include the popular Weird Detective Adventures of Wade Hammond , by Paul Chadwick, Volumes 1-4 (2006-09); Grottos of Chinatown , by Arthur J. Burks (2009); and The Magician Detective and Other Weird Mysteries , by Fulton Oursler (2010).