Sunday, January 25, 2009

Free fiction: 16 monthly issues of "The Argosy" magazine of Frank A Munsey at Internet Archive

Sometimes called the first "pulp" magazine in the US, it has had nearly a century long run, & still efforts are made occasionally to revive the venerable magazine. It used to include science fiction stories, among other genres.

16 issues are now available at Internet Archive, in the form of 4 packages of 4 monthly issues each. Please note the IA post titles don't always match the contents of the package; links below mention what is found inside the downloaded documents.

  1. December 1897 to March 1898: 4 novels, 6 serialized stories, 14 short stories, plus a dozen poems.
  2. December 1898 to March 1899: 4 novels, 7 serialized stories, 14 short stories, & over a dozen poems.
  3. December 1899 to March 1900: 4 novels, 8 serialized stories, 32 short stories, 2 dozen poems.
  4. April-July 1990: Posted today. 4 novels, 8 serialized stories, 48 short stories, & over a dozen poems.
Any future posts of it at IA, along with Astounding scans, will now be automatically picked up by reprints feed.

An aside: Wikipedia provides this helpful tidbit from the early days of the magazine when it was targeted at children: "Munsey found that targeting children had been a mistake, as they did not stay subscribed for any length of time, since they grew out of reading the magazine. Additionally, children did not have much money to spend, which limited the number of advertisers interested in reaching them."

Related.

  1. Stories from The Argosy.
  2. Someone has been maintaining an online database of Argosy covers.

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