About Pulp World

For sixty years the pulps were where American and British popular fiction was made. They were printed on cheap paper, read to pieces, and thrown away. What survives best is the thing that sold them: the cover. A painting commissioned in a week, printed in four colours, and signed — when it was signed at all — in a corner nobody looked at.

Pulp World exists to put those covers somewhere you can find them, next to the facts about the issue they wrapped and the people who made it. Not an auction catalogue and not a gallery, but an index of a whole field, arranged so you can follow a title through its run, an artist through their career, or a year across every magazine that published in it.

3,302 magazine titles and 145,409 issues, spanning 1857 to 2026, from 275 publishers across 6 countries. The catalogue records 395 writers and 1,253 stories so far.

Those numbers are the catalogue. The restoration work — scanning covers, cleaning them, crediting the artist — is just beginning, and most issues here still have no image. That gap is the project.

The bibliographic backbone — which magazines existed, when each issue appeared, how the volumes were numbered — comes chiefly from the Galactic Central index maintained by Phil Stephensen-Payne, a decades-long labour without which a project like this would start from nothing. Errors introduced in transcribing it are ours, not his.

Contents listings, cover credits and restored scans are added by hand, issue by issue. Any of it can be wrong. If you find a mistake, we would rather hear about it than keep it.

Pulp covers were often unsigned, and attributions in this field are frequently informed guesses passed between collectors for decades. Every credit here carries its confidence, so you can tell a signed canvas from a reasonable guess. We would rather admit uncertainty than launder it into fact.

Much of this material is in the public domain; some is not. The site operates a takedown policy, and rights holders can have anything removed by writing to us. Rights and takedown explains how that works and what removal does.

Corrections, missing credits, scans you would like to contribute, or anything else: rights@pulpworld.org .