pulps
Weird Tales, Vol. 9, No. 2
A white-bearded sorcerer recoils in terror beside a prone, fair-skinned woman shrouded in spectral light — the cover scene for Seabury Quinn's story "The Man Who Cast No Shadow." A green candle gutters at her feet; an ominous dark column bisects the frame. The bold slab-serif logotype *Weird Tales — The Unique Magazine* anchors the red border, promising transgression for a quarter. This is pulp at its most earnest: wood-pulp paper, lurid painted covers, and overwrought genre fiction sold on newsstands from 1923 onward. *Weird Tales* gave early publication to H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith, its covers trafficking in the imperiled-woman imagery that would migrate directly into the first comic-book horror anthologies of the 1940s.