You’ve read the books! Now read the handy reference book! Just to know which of THE PULPS you’ve read, which you haven’t, and which to collect, if pulp collecting’s your thing.
THE HERO-PULP INDEX. Compiled by Robert Weinberg, with Lohr McKinstry. Opar Press 1971, 48 pages. $3.50.
The best feature of the Hero Pulp Index is the idea behind its creation. Two dedicated fans of the old pulp magazines, Robert Weinberg and Lohr McKinstry, are responsible for putting together a fine informative little book which serves the double purpose of being a research tool for those of us who wish to devote our efforts to collecting, reading, and preserving the pulp magazines of the 1920’s and 1930’s, and being a conversation piece for those of us who dig nostalgia and lowest-common-denominator publishing and who want our conversation to be factual enough.
Pulps were produced by the hundreds and hundreds of thousands. When browsing through back-date magazine stores, or a science-fiction dealer’s wares at a convention, we can almost believe there were as many different titles as there were books printed! Every cowboy, sports, or locomotive nut could read his fill each month, and the fantasy field alone fragmented down into dozens of sub-categories. Sword and sorcery, Oriental tales, fantasy, “hard” S-F, horror, ghost stories, mysterious heroes – each of these exotic subjects had its faithful following.
The Hero Pulp Index would be of primary interest only to those who focused their search for enjoyment on the hero-oriented stories, especially those in series. Here you will find for example listings of all the stories written by Walter Gibson about the famous Shadow. And that’s quite a listing! Gibson alone wrote 285 Shadow novels, and other writers added more, creating a total of 325. Each one is listed by book, author, title, and date.
It’s amusing to scan the titles of these novels, not only the Shadow stories, but others. You can drift off on your imagination reading such lovely titles as The Book of Death, The Green Terror, The Crystal Skull, and Ghoul’s Carnival, to name only the tiniest fragment.
Two other features add to the book’s worth. Each of the heroes in the Index has a healthy paragraph of biography in the 13-page “Guide to the Hero Pulps” section in the back, explaining who he was, what his powers were, what his gimmick was, etc. And throughout the book there are 16 well-chosen samples of pulp covers; good reproductions on permanent stick paper. They satisfyingly set the Nostalgia Gland throbbing.
It is a little (18 page) gem, and you’ll get good value from it, especially since it’s not just a one-time pleasure, but a treat to be often repeated.
Phil Seuling