The Deadline Economy: What a Peril Cover Paid and How Fast It Had to Arrive

Almost every peculiarity of the peril cover, the cropped threat, the empty lower third, the reused arrangement, the face rendered carefully in the middle of a rough painting, is downstream of money and time. This page puts the documented numbers in one place and works out what they imply.

The physical process those numbers were paying for is described in pencils to paint.

The unit the whole trade was built on

A pulp magazine ran to roughly 128 pages, at about seven by ten inches, on wood pulp stock, and it sold for ten cents. Later it went to fifteen.

That is the number everything else has to fit inside. Ten cents, split between the newsstand, the distributor and the publisher, against paper, printing, editorial, fiction and one cover painting. There is no version of that arithmetic with room in it.

What the writers got

The base rate at the better houses was a cent a word, paid on acceptance. Street and Smith paid it, and it was the standard the field measured itself against.

Below that it got worse in two directions at once. Fringe publishers paid a quarter to half a cent, and they paid on publication or later rather than on acceptance, an arrangement the trade called payment on lawsuit. Popular Publications ran its lower tier under the Fictioneers imprint precisely so that it could pay under a cent a word without the main house name on it.

Above it, the glossy end paid properly. Argosy reached as much as six cents a word through the 1930s, which is where a writer went if the pulps had made his name.

So a nine thousand word novelette at the standard rate is ninety dollars.

What the cover got

Hold that ninety against the best documented cover rate in the field. Farnsworth Wright paid Margaret Brundage ninety dollars a cover for Weird Tales.

One painting, for the price of one substantial story. That is a striking allocation, and it becomes more striking when you remember what the magazine was buying. The story was one of eight or ten items inside a magazine nobody would open unless the front had already worked. The cover was the entire sales effort.

At the other end of the scale, Norman Saunders’ earliest cover paintings sold for twenty five dollars each, according to his son and biographer David Saunders, for work sold to George Delacorte around the turn of 1934 into 1935. Twenty five dollars is two and a half thousand words at the standard rate. That is what a beginner’s cover was worth.

The circulation behind it

Weird Tales is estimated never to have passed about 50,000 copies an issue. Doc Savage and The Shadow ran at something closer to 300,000, and the biggest pulps of the 1920s had gone over a million.

Weird Tales was therefore a small magazine paying a real cover rate, which tells you the covers were not a decoration on that budget. They were the differentiator, and the publisher knew it. A distinctive front was the only thing keeping a fifty thousand copy title visible on a rack it shared with three hundred thousand copy titles at the same price.

What the arithmetic did to the picture

Six consequences, all of them visible in the work.

Speed became a qualification. At these rates an illustrator who needed three weeks on a cover could not eat. One who could deliver in a few days could make a living. The trade selected for fast painters, and fast painting has a look: large simple shapes, few values, decisive edges, no fussing.

The threat got cropped. A hand, a shadow, a silhouette clipped by the frame. This is usually explained as a compositional preference, and it is a good one, but it is also the cheapest possible way to put a second character in a picture. A fully rendered villain is another head, another pair of hands, another costume, another day.

Backgrounds got thin. The environment on most of these covers is a tone and a suggestion. It is the one place where time can be saved without a reader noticing.

Arrangements got reused. Twelve fronts a year for a title that has to look like itself every month, at a rate that does not permit invention, produces a small vocabulary of layouts recycled with the furniture changed. Read the run of any weird menace title and the pattern is unmistakable, which is the subject of the shudder pulps.

The cover came before the story. Approving a scene and then commissioning fiction to reach it is cheaper than reading a manuscript and then commissioning a painting from it, and it is faster. It is also why so many covers depict a moment that occupies half a page somewhere in the middle of the weakest story in the issue. The commercial logic behind that inversion is set out in the peril cover.

And the money went to the face. Given a fixed number of hours, an experienced cover painter spends them where the reader looks. Everything else is finished only to the level that survives reduction.

The career shape this produced

Pulp cover work was rarely anybody’s destination. It was where an able illustrator built speed and a portfolio.

Walter M. Baumhofer’s career traces that shape from end to end. Born in Brooklyn in 1904, trained at Pratt Institute on a scholarship under Dean Cornwell and H. Winfield Scott, painting pulp covers from 1926 across Doc Savage, Dime Mystery, Dime Detective and The Spider. After 1937 he joined the American Artists agency and moved to the general magazines, illustrating for Collier’s, Cosmopolitan and Esquire, and in 1945 he relocated to Long Island and turned to gallery painting.

That is a man leaving the pulps as soon as the slicks would have him, which is what the rates predict. The illustrators who stayed longest were the ones who were fastest, and the ones who were fastest set the visual standard for the whole category.

The same arithmetic now

The rates have changed and the structure has not.

A cover is still one image asked to sell a book to a stranger who has not decided to spend anything. It is still commissioned early, often before the interior exists. It still has to be legible in a fraction of a second, and the moment of decision has moved from four feet on a wire rack to about twenty five millimetres on a storefront grid, which is a harsher test rather than a softer one.

What has genuinely gone is the second half of the old bargain. The pulp painter was paid badly and then had the original thrown away. The contemporary illustrator keeps the file, keeps the credit, and can sell prints of it. On the evidence of what survives from the 1930s, that is not a small difference.