Editorial: collecting popular culture.(Editorial)

AS MOST ANYONE WHO HAS STUDIED POPULAR CULTURE WILL KNOW, one of the most difficult problems in researching the historical artifacts of popular culture is locating primary source materials. Tracking down the products of popular culture can be a difficult, time-consuming, and often frustrating job. It was something I encountered firsthand recently.

A few years ago, I came up with the idea of editing a collection of short stories written by Francis Stevens. Stevens was the pseudonym of an American woman named Gertrude Barrows Bennett (1883-1948) who published horror and fantasy stories in the pulp magazines in the years during and immediately following World War I. Stevens's work was something of an anomaly in the pulp fiction field. She helped to create a new type of narrative genre, modern dark fantasy, in a medium dominated by male writers, editors, and readers. She was a contemporary of A. Merritt and H. P. Lovecraft, and strongly influenced the fantasy and horror fiction of both. Yet, for today's readers, her important contributions have been mostly forgotten, and she has been dropped from the literary history of the period.

Having read a 1970 paperback reprint of Stevens's novel, The Citadel of Fear (1918), edited by Sam Moskowitz, as well as an even older Polaris Press 1952 hardcover reprint of Stevens's dystopian fantasy, The Heads of Cerberus (1919), which was edited by Lloyd Arthur Eshbach, and following the trail of tantalizing clues left by the editors of each of the reprints in their introductions, I decided that it might be a worthwhile endeavor to locate Stevens's "undiscovered" pulp fiction and assemble and reprint these stories for a new generation of readers. It was perhaps a noble thought at the time, but I did not know the difficulties that were in store for me as I attempted to locate the original magazine appearances of Stevens's tales in pulps such as The Argosy and All-Story Weekly. It turned out to be a task as scary as anything that might have appeared in Stevens's own horror fiction.

I began my search with various academic libraries, but no library carried back issues of these pulps. I then entered the potentially rewarding arena of the book collectors' market to see if I could purchase specific issues of The Argosy and All-Story Weekly that I knew, from my reading of the few available secondary sources, contained Francis Stevens short stories. However, even with Internet searches on international book collector Web sites, I had no luck locating the specific issues that I needed for my collection. Traveling to several regional "pulp cons," book huckster conventions where pulp magazines are bought, sold, and traded, I was able to locate a few of the elusive pulps I needed, but they were expensive to purchase and nearly impossible to find.

Part of the problem, it became readily apparent to me, was in the ephemeral nature of the pulp magazine. During its heyday in America, from about 1900 to 1950, hundreds of different pulp titles were produced on the cheapest paper available at the time (hence the name "pulp," the inexpensive pulpwood stock used in printing), and they were intended to be read (or "consumed") and disposed of as quickly as possible before reading the next issue, much like today's newspapers. Not many pulps survived their original publications, and those that did have deteriorated over the years to the point where their pages are yellowing and crumble into dust at the touch of a hand.

My experiences with obtaining pulp magazines published over 80 years ago, no doubt, are similar to those that many scholars and students of popular culture have encountered when researching sheet music, or beer bottles, or candy boxes, or comic books, or any of thousands of different categories of popular culture artifacts that are part of the post-Industrial Revolution's historical record. Much of what was produced in the past, even the recent past, does not survive today because it was not thought that this "disposable culture" was important enough to ...