The Windy City Pulp and Paper Convention turns 23 this year. It will return to the Westin Lombard Yorktown Center on Friday, April 5, and run through Sunday, April 7. The doors will open at 11 a.m. on Friday, but early-bird shoppers will get the first shot starting at 9:30 a.m. The convention runs until 3 p.m. on Sunday and will salute the 90th anniversary of the weird-menace pulps.
The popular Windy City Film Festival, organized and emceed by the one and only Ed Hulse of Murania Press, returns in 2024. Material from the Robert Weinberg Estate and the Glenn Lord Estate, along with many interesting items from other consignors, will be the focus of the Friday and Saturday night auctions. An art show and New Pulp Sunday will also be part of the convention’s schedule. And, of course, Tom Roberts, the publisher of Black Dog Books and winner of the 2008 Lamont Award, will be putting together another great edition of Windy City Pulp Stories. The focus will be the weird-menace magazines.
Click on the link that starts our post to learn more about this year’s Windy City Pulp and Paper Convention or visit the convention’s Facebook page. They will be filling in more details as the convention approaches. Be sure to bookmark both sites.
While at this year’s Windy City, pick up a PulpFest 2024 postcard and one of the convention’s newsletters. Both will be available at the show.
Less than four months after the Westin Lombard Yorktown Center bids adieu to Windy City, PulpFest 2024 will be center stage. It begins on Thursday evening, August 1, and runs through Sunday afternoon, August 4. The convention will take place just outside of Pittsburgh at the DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel Pittsburgh – Cranberry in Mars, Pennsylvania. To learn how to join PulpFest 2024, click the Registration button on our website. If you need lodging, you can also book a room through our site.
To learn more about what PulpFest 2024 has to offer, click here or here.
This year’s Windy City convention will celebrate the 90th anniversary of the shudder pulp. The genre debuted in 1933 when Popular Publications gave up on reprinting hardcover mystery novels in Dime Mystery Book Magazine and turned the magazine over to the weird-menace genre. The field took off after Popular introduced Terror Tales in the fall of 1934 and Horror Stories shortly thereafter.
Our featured image is excerpted from the first issue of Horror Stories, dated January 1935, with cover art by John Newton Howitt. Our lead image is the first issue Dime Mystery Magazine, dated October 1933, with cover art by Walter M. Baumhofer. The latter is considered to be the first weird-menace pulp. Our final image is the first issue of Terror Tales. Dated September 1934, it features cover art by Rudolph Zirm.
For more on the weird-menace genre and one shudder pulp in particular, check out our Spicy Mystery video on our YouTube Channel . . .
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