Argosy, later titled The Argosy, Argosy All-Story Weekly and The New Golden Argosy,  was an American pulp magazine from 1882 through 1978, published by Frank Munsey until its sale to Popular Publications in 1942. It is the first American pulp magazine. The magazine began as a children's weekly story–paper entitled The Golden Argosy. In the era before the Second World War, Argosy was regarded as one of the "Big Four" pulp magazines (along with Blue Book, Adventure and Short Stories), the most prestigious publications in the pulp market, that many pulp magazine writers aspired to publish in. John Clute, discussing the American pulp magazines in the first two decades of the twentieth century, has described The Argosy and its companion The All-Story as "the most important pulps of their era."

Publication history

The Golden Argosy 
In the late 1870s, Frank Munsey was working in Augusta, Maine, as the manager of the Western Union office there.  He helped a friend get a job at a publisher in Augusta, and after a couple of years his friend moved to New York City to another publishing company.  Munsey was becoming more familiar with the publishing industry during this time, and decided he wanted to launch a magazine of his own.  He had some difficulty in getting anyone to agree to invest, but eventually persuaded a stockbroker he knew to put in $2,500, of which $500 was a loan to Munsey.  Munsey invested $500 of his own, and his friend in New York City added another $1,000, making a total of $4,000 in capital.  Munsey resigned from Western Union, and moved to New York on September 23, 1882, bringing with him manuscripts he had bought for the magazine before leaving Augusta.

Once in New York, Munsey quickly realized that the cost estimates he had made, based on what he had been able to learn while in Maine, were unrealistically low.  His original plan for the magazine had been to make it a close copy of Golden Days, a juvenile weekly paper published in Philadelphia by James Elverson, and to include lithographed covers and internal illustrations.  He abandoned these ideas and came up with a simplified approach, still based on Golden Days, that he believed could be made profitable.  He wrote to the stockbroker  who had promised $2,500 to get the funds sent to him, but received no reply, and since this made it impossible to start the magazine as planned, Munsey released his New York friend from his promise of investment.  This left Munsey with only about $40, along with the manuscripts he had in hand, which had cost over $500 to acquire.  He began looking for a publisher who would back the new magazine, and eventually persuaded E. G. Rideout to take it on.  The first issue, titled The Golden Argosy, with Munsey as editor and manager, was dated December 9, 1882; it was eight pages long and cost five cents.

Five months later Rideout went bankrupt.  Munsey had not drawn all his salary, so he was owed money by the bankrupt company, and he claimed the magazine's title and subscription list in return for his debt, succeeding over a competing claim from a publisher who would have merged the magazine's subscriptions into those of his own publication.  The first issue with Munsey as publisher was dated September 8, 1883.  Munsey again was reduced to a few dollars, but he was able to borrow $300 from Oscar Holway, a banker in Augusta who was a friend.  At about this time he bought some stories from Malcolm Douglas, but when Douglas came to collect his payment Munsey offered him the job of editor, at $10 per week, in lieu of payment for the stories.  Douglas accepted.

A friend from Augusta, John Fogler, who had become cashier of Augusta's First National Bank, was able to arrange another loan for Munsey, of $1,000, and Munsey kept to the weekly schedule without missing an issue, but the financial pressure on him was enormous.  Rideout had set up Munsey in an office on Barclay Street in what is now known as Tribeca, in Manhattan; Munsey moved to an office on Warren Street nearby to reduce the rent, and he and Douglas would eat in a German beer saloon where they could get a free lunch.  Munsey and Douglas assembled free material by rewriting items from English boys' papers.  One week, Douglas was unable to find enough material to fill an issue.  Munsey wrote a short story that night: "Harry's Scheme, or Camping Among the Maples", about two boys in the Maine woods, and turned it in to Douglas the next morning.  Douglas twice saw Munsey write a letter to Elverson, offering the subscription list of The Golden Argosy in return for a job at $50 per week, but Munsey did not mail either letter. 

In 1884 James Blaine was the Republican candidate for President.  Blaine knew of Munsey from Augusta, and his campaign needed help with publicity: Munsey proposed a new magazine, Munsey's Illustrated Weekly, to carry campaign news.  It only lasted two months, from September 6 to November 8, 1884, but it helped Munsey by giving him an official-seeming presence in publishing that made it much easier for him to obtain credit for paper and other supplies. Before the campaign he had been unable to get credit; after it he was $8,000 in debt to his suppliers.  Ten years later Munsey recalled the change, and said "That debt made me.  Before, I had no credit and had to live from hand to mouth.  But when I owed $8,000 my creditors didn't dare drop me.  They saw their only chance of getting anything was to keep me going."  Munsey had a bank account in New York, but kept two more, in Maine and Chicago, moving funds between them constantly: "I kept thousands of dollars in the air between these three banks.  It was a dizzy, dazzling, daring game, a game to live for, to die for, a royal glorious game".  Munsey told a story of being unable to meet payroll because the New York bank would not give him credit.  He went to the bank, upbraided the president for his "effrontery", and left without letting the man speak.  When his employee went to the bank again that day, he was able to cash the payroll check.

The fact that The Golden Argosy never missed an issue also helped Munsey persuade the businesses he worked with to extend him credit, which in turn helped him invest in the business.  In the winter of 1885/1886 he wrote a serial, "Afloat in a Great City", with the intention of using it as the basis for an advertising campaign to increase subscriptions.  Munsey owed $5,000 at this point, and went into debt by about another $10,000 in order to advertise the story, distributing 100,000 sample copies of the March 13, 1886 issue containing the first instalment of the serial in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the surrounding areas.  The campaign was a success, and from being a more-or-less breakeven concern, The Golden Argosy began to net Munsey about $100 a week in profit, not counting the cost of the campaign.  This convinced Munsey to invest further in building circulation.  A new editor, Matthew White, took over from Douglas at the end of the year. At the same time Munsey doubled the page count and increased the price from five cents to six, and in 1887 he began a national advertising campaign, with traveling representatives as far west as Nebraska, and a mail campaign for points further west.  He wrote another story, "The Boy Broker", for serialization, beginning in the February 5, 1887 issue, and credited it with adding 20,000 to The Golden Argosy's circulation.   Over five months the campaign gave out 11,500,000 sample issues: his debt ballooned to $95,000, but he was now clearing $1,500 a week in profit, and circulation reached 115,000  in May 1887.

The Argosy 

The improvement in Munsey's finances was temporary, though before Munsey realized it he had given up his cheap rooms and moved to the Windsor Hotel on Fifth Avenue.  Another advertising campaign was launched; it cost $20,000 but produced no results, and Munsey began to experiment with the magazine, trying to find a profitable approach.  He shortened the title to just The Argosy with the December 1, 1888 issue.  He later commented that he had not realized the particular problems attendant on magazines for children—they grew up quickly and dropped their subscriptions, so circulation was very difficult to maintain; and because they had little spending power it was hard to interest advertisers.  He reduced the page size and increased the page count, and added illustrated covers, and cut the price, and then reversed all these changes, but nothing worked.  In 1890 circulation dropped to the point where it no longer covered its own costs. The expenses Munsey had taken on after the successful campaign in 1887 were now a drain, and when his friend Fogler visited, and was impressed that Munsey was living at the Windsor, he told Fogler, "I can't afford it ... but it is a means to an end.  It gives me standing to have the acquaintance of the men I meet here."  Fogler also discovered on that visit that Munsey had bought a pew in a popular church for $1,000 a year.

Munsey launched two more periodicals, hoping that they would establish themselves as profitable before The Argosy failed completely.  The first was Munsey's Weekly, launched on February 2, 1889; the second was a newspaper, the Daily Continent, which he took over in February 1891 and gave up on four months later.  The Weekly was not a success either, and in late 1891 Munsey converted it into a monthly, titled Munsey's Magazine, priced at 25 cents.  Fogler, now working for a bank in Kansas, arranged a loan for Munsey that grew to $8,000, with half Munsey's stock as collateral.  In the Panic of 1893 the bank called in the loan, and Munsey offered Fogler the stock if he would take over the loan.  Fogler declined, and Munsey had to arrange for another loan at 18% interest to cover the repayment. In October 1893 Munsey cut the price of Munsey's Magazine to 10 cents.  He had to struggle to distribute it at this price, since the American News Company had a monopoly on magazine distribution and had little interest in a low-priced magazine.  By the February issue Munsey was printing 200,000 copies, and it soon became successful enough to guarantee his financial security.

The Argosy did not share in the success of Munsey's Magazine; circulation continued to decline, but Munsey kept it going, as he later said, "as a matter of sentiment", and to see what could be made of it.  From a high of 115,000 the circulation fell to 9,000 for the March 24, 1894 issue, which was the last one as a weekly.  Munsey switched it to monthly publication with the April issue, and circulation jumped to 40,000 immediately, but went no higher for over two years.  With the October 1896 issue Munsey changed it to carry fiction only, targeted at adults rather than children; it was the first magazine to print only fiction. Starting with the December issue he began printing it on cheap wood-pulp paper,  making The Argosy the first pulp magazine. The all-fiction format brought about another jump in circulation to 80,000.  In 1898, with circulation still at around 80,000, Munsey bought Peterson's Magazine and merged it into The Argosy.  A year or so later circulation began to climb again: Munsey spent nothing on advertising, but circulation reached 300,000 in 1902, and hit half a million in 1907, 25 years after it was launched.

The Argosy's circulation fell from this peak, and it returned to a weekly schedule in 1917.  In 1906 Munsey had started The Railroad Man's Magazine, which carried both fiction and non-fiction; after the January 18, 1919 issue it was merged into The Argosy, which was retitled Argosy and Railroad Man's Magazine briefly, reverting to just Argosy with the May 31 issue.  Paper shortages caused by World War I forced a reduction in the page count of both The Argosy and All-Story Weekly, another Munsey fiction magazine, and costs continued to go up after the war.  Most of the other major fiction magazines of the day increased their price to at twenty cents; Top-Notch Magazine was a holdout at fifteen cents, but Munsey kept both Argosy and All-Story at ten cents.  In 1920 he merged All-Story Weekly into The Argosy, explaining that this let him keep the price of the combined magazine at ten cents, while saving "all the cost of stories in one magazine, all the cost of the editorial force, all the cost of typesetting, all the cost of making electrotype plates, and many other minor costs".  The low price, sustained through most of the 1920s, must have been a strong benefit to circulation, which is reported to have reached half a million when the combined magazine, now titled Argosy All-Story Weekly, debuted, and stayed at about 400,000 during the following decade.  The first issue of the new magazine added pages to allow it to carry continuations of the serials that had been running in each of the two magazines before the merger, and Sam Moskowitz, a magazine historian, comments that this approach "was such that it is doubtful that a single nonduplicating reader was lost from either magazine".  The page count gradually dropped again as the serials were completed, from 224 after the merger to 144 at the end of the year.

Dewart, Popular Publications, and later revivals 

In 1925 Munsey died.  The publisher continued to be the Frank A. Munsey Corporation; Thomas Dewart took over as president.  Matthew White, who had been editor since 1886, was finally replaced by A. H. Bittner in 1928; Bittner lasted about three years, his successors throughout the 1930s only lasted a year or two each.  In October 1929 Munsey's Magazine and Argosy All-Story Weekly were combined and immediately split again into two magazines: one was titled All-Story Combined with Munsey's, and the other continued as Argosy.  Circulation fell to about 40,000 by the end of the 1930s.  Another Munsey magazine, All-American Fiction, was merged into Argosy in 1938.  Argosy remained a weekly until the October 4, 1941 issue, after which two issues a month appeared, on irregular dates, until April 1942.  That year Argosy was caught in a crackdown by Frank Walker, the Postmaster General.  The Post Office declared that publishers should consider "decency and good morals" in deciding what could be included in a mailed magazine, and promptly notified dozens of publishers that they had to attend a hearing in Washington or lose their permits.  The hearings were thought by most publishers to be pointless, and nobody from Munsey attended.  Argosy briefly lost its permit as a result, but did not miss any issues, switching to a monthly schedule starting with the May 1942 issue.

In September 1942 Popular Publications, a pulp magazine publisher, bought all Munsey's pulp magazine titles from Dewart, including The Argosy.  It ceased to use pulp paper from 1943, and continued for 35 more years, on a regular monthly schedule other than a few missed issues near the start of Popular's ownership, and a couple of bimonthly issues at the end.  The last issue from Popular was dated November/December 1978.  Four more monthly issues appeared from August to November 1979, published by Lifetime Wholesalers, Inc.

The magazine has been revived three times since then.  Between 1989 and 1994, six issues were produced by Richard Kyle, at irregular intervals. Kyle had intended to revive the publication in the mid 1980s, but his financing collapsed.  He had, however commissioned Jack Kirby to create a strip based on his early life in New York. Although Kyle was unable to secure fresh financing, he pushed ahead with publication in 1990. Issue 2 of the revived magazine included Kirby's "Street Code", shot as intended from the finished pencils.

Three more issues, dated in 2004 and 2005, appeared from Lou Anders and James A. Owen, with the third issue edited by Owen alone, and retitled Argosy Quarterly.  One more issue, from Altus Press, appeared in 2016.

Contents and reception
The first issue included the first installments of serialized stories by Horatio Alger, Jr., and Edward S. Ellis.  Other authors associated with Argosy’s early days include Annie Ashmoore, W. H. W. Campbell, Harry Castlemon, Frank H. Converse, George H. Coomer, Mary A. Denison, Malcolm Douglas, Colonel A. B. Ellis, J. L. Harbour, D. O. S. Lowell, Oliver Optic, Richard Handfield Titherington, Edgar L. Warren and Matthew White, Jr. White would become the Argosy'''s editor from 1886 to 1928.

In January 1919, The Argosy merged with Railroad Man's Magazine, and was briefly known as Argosy and Railroad Man's Magazine.Prior to World War One, The Argosy had several notable writers, including Upton Sinclair, Zane Grey, Albert Payson Terhune, Gertrude Barrows Bennett (under the pseudonym Francis Stevens), and former dime novelist William Wallace Cook.Argosy All-Story Weekly published works in a number of literary genres, including science fiction and Westerns. Edgar Rice Burroughs published some of his Tarzan and John Carter of Mars stories in the magazine; other science fiction writers included Ralph Milne Farley, Ray Cummings, Otis Adelbert Kline and A. Merritt.

In 1922 Argosy missed a chance to launch the career of E. E. Smith. Bob Davis, then editor of Argosy, rejected the manuscript of The Skylark of Space, writing to Smith that he liked the novel personally, but that it was "too far out" for his readers. This "encouraging rejection letter" did encourage Smith to try further, finally getting his novel published in Amazing Stories.Argosy published a number of adventure stories by Johnston McCulley (including the Zorro stories), C. S. Forester (adventures at sea), Theodore Roscoe (French Foreign Legion stories), L. Patrick Greene, (who specialized in narratives about Africa), and George F. Worts' tales about Peter the Brazen, an American radio operator who has adventures in China. H. Bedford-Jones wrote a series of historical swashbuckler stories for Argosy about an Irish soldier, Denis Burke. Borden Chase appeared in Argosy with crime fiction. Two humorous mystery-adventure serials by Lester Dent appeared in Argosy's pages. More serious mystery stories were represented by Cornell Woolrich, Norbert Davis, and Fred MacIsaac.

Max Brand, Clarence E. Mulford, Walt Coburn, Charles Alden Seltzer and Tom Curry wrote Western fiction for the magazine. Other authors who appeared in the original run included Ellis Parker Butler, Hugh Pendexter, Robert E. Howard, Will Levinrew, Gordon MacCreagh and Harry Stephen Keeler. Brand's character Dr. Kildare first appeared in 1938.Argosy's covers were drawn by several noted magazine illustrators, including Emmett Watson, Edgar Franklin Wittmack, Paul Stahr, Modest Stein and Robert A. Graef.

In November 1941 the magazine switched to biweekly publication, then monthly publication in July 1942. The most significant change occurred in September 1943 when the magazine not only changed from pulp to slick paper but began to shift away from its all-fiction content. Over the next few years the fiction content grew smaller (though still with the occasional short-story writer of stature, such as P. G. Wodehouse), and the "men's magazine" material expanded. By the late 1940s, it had become associated with the men's adventure genre of "true" stories of conflict with wild animals or wartime combat.

In the late 1940s and 1950s Argosy experienced a significant boost in sales when it began running a new true crime column, The Court of Last Resort. Lawyer-turned-author Erle Stanley Gardner (the creator of Perry Mason) enlisted assistance from police, private detectives, and other professional experts to examine the cases of dozens of convicts who maintained their innocence long after their appeals were exhausted. The popular column appeared in Argosy'' from September 1948 until October 1958, and was adapted for television as a 26-episode series by NBC.

See also
Works originally published in Argosy

Notes

References

Sources

External links

The Golden Argosy (1882-1888) at the HathiTrust
The Argosy (1888-1920) at the HathiTrust
Argosy All-Story Weekly (1920-1929) at the HathiTrust
Altus Press

1882 establishments in New York (state)
1978 disestablishments in New York (state)
Children's magazines published in the United States
Men's magazines published in the United States
Weekly magazines published in the United States
Defunct literary magazines published in the United States
Magazines established in 1882
Magazines disestablished in 1978
Magazines published in New York City
Men's adventure magazines
Pulp magazines