Up Front: Pulp Fiction
“Pulp” magazines and novels were inexpensive fiction publications widely distributed through the 1950s. Printed on cheap paper with ragged untrimmed edges and priced at ten cents, these novels and magazines titillated readers with stories of crime, murder, and of course sex. The term “pulp fiction” stems from the cheap wood pulp paper on which such publications were printed and of course there was not a lick of truth in them. The ones that sold the most were jammed full of lurid and exploitative stories that were sold by sensationalized cover art. Pulp publications were purchased primarily by men who probably moved on to the “real” thing in Playboy once that magazine hit its heyday. The irony is that romance novels and smut novels written by such luminaries as Danielle Steel are for all intents and purposes the modern pulp fiction.