Street & Smith Publications regularly featured holiday covers, particularly around Christmas or New Year’s Day. The publisher seems to have started the tradition of releasing a “holiday number” in The Popular Magazine. As early as 1904 — in the pulp magazine’s second year — the December issue discussed “Holiday Temptations” in its cover copy, and featured a woman standing under a sprig of mistletoe. The tradition of running “Fine Christmas Stories” around the holidays was continued in Popular through the Second January Number of 1930.
About a year after establishing Detective Story Magazine — the first specialized fiction pulp magazine — Street & Smith began to include a Christmas story or two around the winter holidays. With its December 23, 1919 issue, the company began advertising, “Sparkling Christmas Stories,” above the Detective Story masthead.
You’ll find similar advertising on some of their other specialty pulps, including Love Story Magazine, Sport Story Magazine, Western Story Magazine, and Wild West Weekly. You’ll find “A Christmas Novel,” by Frank Richardson Pierce, as late as the December 1948 number of Western Story, not long before the publisher pulled the plug on all of their pulp magazines. Frank Tinsley’s cover art shows a cowpoke on a horse. A Christmas-like star shines above.
Other than Ranch Romances, girlie pulps such as Breezy Stories and Snappy, and a few science-fiction digests — including Galaxy Science Fiction and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction — most other fiction magazine publishers did not seem inclined to link their books to the holidays.
More often than not, the December and January cover paintings for Standard Magazines’ Thrilling Love seemed to feature a pretty girl in the arms of a football player. And The Phantom Detective didn’t exchange his top hat for a Santa cap while investigating “Murder at the North Pole,” the lost and rightly forgotten Robert Wallace mystery classic.
Unless you believe that when The Spider donned his fangs, fright-wig, and hunchback disguise, he bore a striking resemblance to Krampus, Popular Publications largely ignored the holidays in their pulps. Except for an occasional issue of Rangeland Romances, New Love Magazine, or another of the publisher’s romance titles, neither Christmas nor New Year’s Day seemed to exist.
Early in its history, Fiction House co-founder John B. Kelly asked writers to deliver . . .
“Action, stripped to the bone, denuded of all superfluous trimmings . . . spelled with a capital A . . . no lengthy descriptions, no long-winded digressions, no weather reports . . . Just the stripped action meat of a dramatic, swift-moving plot, laid in any adventurous land under the sun . . .”
So it comes as no small surprise that for a few brief years, the first January issue of North•West Stories was labeled as the pulp’s “Chrismas Number.” You’ll find the 1927 and 1928 issues pictured above. As we’ve not seen the cover for the January 1929 issue, we can’t be sure of its true status. But the issue includes “A Two-Gun Santa,” a novella written by Frederick C. Davis.
It is possible that the publisher’s Love Romances offers more than a few Christmas issues. Unfortunately, copies of the magazine are difficult to locate. The January 1928 issue features a Christmas-themed cover by C. Clyde Squires. Included in the issue are Peggy Gaddis’s “The Christmas Tree Angel” and “Christmas for Sale,” written by Grace Reeve Fennell. There’s also an uncredited article entitled “Forecast for a Happy New Year.”
Your friends from PulpFest — Mike Chomko, Jack and Sally Cullers, Bill Lampkin, Sara Light-Waller, Craig McDonald, William Patrick Maynard, and Barry Traylor — would like to wish everyone a healthy and happy holiday season. We’ll be back one week from today, as we enjoy some time off with our families.
According to pulp art historian, David Saunders, “George H. Wert is best known in connection with Nick Eggenhofer and Lorence Bjorklund as one of the top pen & ink artists in western pulp magazines. Yet, Wert has the unique distinction of having also painted many pulp magazine covers for Action Novels, Action Stories, Lariat Stories, North•West Stories, The Popular Magazine, Short Stories, and Western Story.” Pictured here is his cover for the January 8, 1927 issue of North•West Stories, one of Fiction House’s rare Christmas issues in their line of pulp magazines.
Our featured image — painted by F. R. Glass — is from the January 8, 1928 issue of North•West Stories.
Debuting as Novelets with its December 1923, North•West Stories gained its new name with its May 1925 number. Between its April 1932 number and its Spring 1936 issue, the magazine was suspended. With its Fall 1937 issue, it became North•West Romances. Its final issue was dated Spring 1953. Through its three incarnations, it ran for a total of 202 issues, making it the second-longest-running Fiction House pulp magazine, behind Action Stories.
Gloria Stoll Karn, our guest of honor at PulpFest 2017, painted the cover art for the January 1947 issue of Popular Publications’ All-Story Love. Gloria painted 28 covers for the magazine from June 1944 – November 1948. She was also a significant contributor to the publisher’s Dime Mystery Magazine, creating fourteen covers for the title.
We’d like to thank David W. Smith of Fantasy Illustrated for providing the scan of George Wert’s North•West Stories cover. David is one of the leading pulp and popular culture dealers in the United States. He sells via mail order from his house near Mill Creek, Washington, where he lives with his wife Kelli.
Please note — there is no Phantom Detective adventure entitled, “Murder at the North Pole.” We made it up. So please don’t start hunting for it.
