Pulp Art: Original Cover Paintings for the Great American Pulp Magazines

The term pulp fiction has always had a certain resonance; but it is the artwork–bold, energized, dramatic, garishly colorful, and frequently grotesque–that has made pulp magazines memorable to so many people. Pulp Art is the groundbreaking–and ultimate–book on one of America’s most important and spectacular forms of illustration art. At last, preserved in this volume are most of the still-existing originals created for the pulp covers, never before seen in all their sharply focused, vibrantly colored brilliance. Robert Lesser, a pioneering collector of this work and an expert on American popular culture, has assembled a gallery of these now-priceless originals. The dynamically pulp-flavored text is a complete historical survey of the pulps and their most important cover artists–Virgil Finlay, J. Allen St. John, Rafael de Soto, Hannes Bok, George and Jerome Rozen, Frank R. Paul, and many others. Also offered are critical discussions of individual paintings, as well as the major themes of the pulp magazines.