The Shudder Pulps: The Peril Cover on an Industrial Schedule

Between late 1933 and 1941 an American magazine publisher ran a category built on almost nothing except the picture on the front. The trade called them weird menace pulps at the time and shudder pulps afterwards, and they matter here because they are the clearest documented case of the peril cover being manufactured to a schedule rather than arrived at by taste.

Everything below has an issue date attached to it.

Where the category came from

Popular Publications was founded by Harry Steeger and Harold Goldsmith. In December 1932 the firm launched Dime Mystery Book Magazine, with Rogers Terrill as its first editor. It did not do well.

Steeger had visited the Théâtre du Grand-Guignol in Paris, the small Montmartre house that had spent decades staging short plays of graphic physical horror for paying audiences, and he took the idea back to a failing title. Dime Mystery changed its formula with the October 1933 issue. That issue is the start date of the category, and the change worked well enough that Popular built two more magazines on the same plan within two years.

The rule that shaped the covers

The house requirement is the interesting part, because it is a content rule that produced a picture.

A weird menace story could look supernatural for as long as it liked, but the ending had to explain the horror in ordinary terms. No ghosts that stayed ghosts. Whatever had been stalking the heroine turned out to be a man in a costume, a doctor with a theory, a cult with a business model.

Follow that rule out to the cover and the design problem solves itself in one direction only. If the monster cannot be a monster, the monster is a person. A person can be cropped, silhouetted, reduced to a gloved hand or a shadow across a wall, and a person threatening another person is legible in a way no invented creature is. The threat on a shudder pulp front is nearly always human, and it is human because an editor said the story had to end that way.

The rest of the arrangement follows the newsstand grammar described in the peril cover, which the pulps had already worked out on other categories. Weird menace did not invent that grammar. It ran it at a volume nobody had tried before.

The three titles, with dates

Terror Tales arrived first, with a September 1934 issue, and ran until March 1941.

Horror Stories followed with a January 1935 issue and ran to 47 issues before stopping in 1941. Its covers were mostly the work of John Newton Howitt, who also handled Terror Tales.

Dime Mystery outlived both, because it stopped being a weird menace magazine. With the October 1938 issue it dropped the formula and moved to detective fiction, and it kept going under one title or another for 159 issues, finishing in late 1950 as 15 Mystery Stories.

So the category itself is bracketed by two dates that are eight years apart: October 1933 and 1941. That is the whole life of it.

The credits

Dime Mystery has the cleanest documented run of cover artists. Walter M. Baumhofer painted the fronts until 1936, and Tom Lovell took over through 1936 and much of 1937.

Baumhofer is worth naming properly, because he is one of the few pulp cover painters whose career is fully traceable. He was born in Brooklyn in 1904, attended Pratt Institute on a scholarship, and studied under Dean Cornwell and H. Winfield Scott. He began painting pulp covers in 1926 and worked across Doc Savage, Pete Rice, Dime Detective and The Spider as well as Dime Mystery. After 1937 he moved to the American Artists agency and spent the rest of his commercial career illustrating for Collier’s, Cosmopolitan and Esquire, and in 1945 he relocated to Long Island and turned to gallery painting.

That trajectory is typical and tells you something about the trade. A pulp cover was a job an able illustrator did on the way somewhere else, at speed, for a rate that made speed compulsory.

John Newton Howitt, who carried both the horror titles, has the shorter public record: 1885 to 1958, and a body of surviving covers that collectors have catalogued issue by issue. The paintings themselves are a different matter, and almost all of them are gone.

What the schedule did to the picture

Popular ran these magazines monthly or close to it, at ten cents, in the standard pulp format of roughly 128 pages at seven by ten inches. Writers on the firm’s lower tier were paid under a cent a word through its Fictioneers imprint. Nothing in that arithmetic leaves room for deliberation.

A monthly title needs a new front every four weeks, and it needs the front to be recognisably the same product as last month while not being the same picture. That is a design brief with almost no freedom in it, and the result is exactly what you would predict: a small set of arrangements, reused with the furniture changed. A cellar, a laboratory, a barn. A raised implement. A cropped figure at the edge. One warm colour in a cold field.

Read the whole run at once and the repetition stops looking like a failure of imagination and starts looking like a specification being met. Which is what it was. The mechanics of that specification are taken apart in reading a peril cover.

How it ended, and what that leaves

Dime Mystery walked away from the formula in October 1938, which is early enough to suggest the category was already tiring. The other two titles were killed by the paper shortage that followed the United States entering the war, both stopping in 1941.

What survives is mostly the printed magazines, not the art. Popular Publications was among the houses that disposed of original cover paintings once the plates were made, and the surviving canvases from this whole industry are a small fraction of what was produced. The one named artist from this era whose working life is documented in detail, including what she was paid and what she painted on, is the subject of Margaret Brundage and the Weird Tales record.

Eight years, three titles, a few hundred covers, and a formula that outlived every magazine that used it.