Under the Moons of Mars: A History and Anthology of "the Scientific Romance" in the Munsey Magazines, 1912-1920 (58 page)

TYPICALLY, IN THE face of growing pulp-magazine competition, instead of marshaling his substantial resources and imagination in combating it, Munsey took off in a new direction. He conceived of a periodical to be titled THE SCRAP BOOK. "Everything that appeals to the human brain and human heart will come within the compass of THE SCRAP BOOK—fiction, which is the backbone of a periodical circulation; biography, review, philosophy, science, art, poetry, wit, humor, pathos, satire, the weird, the mystical—everything that can be classified and everything that cannot be classified. A paragraph, a little bit, a saying, an editorial, a joke, a maxim, an epigram all these will be comprised in the monthly budget of THE SCRAP BOOK," Munsey told his readers.

The first issue of the magazine was dated March, 1906. Robert H. Davis had responsibility for it, but managing editor was the author Perley Poore Sheehan. "The Newest Thing That Ever Happened," the cover blazoned. "This magazine contains more human interest matter than has ever been crowded between the covers of a single magazine." The magazine sold for ten cents, and the first issue gave 192 pages of printed matter, unillustrated, on pulp paper. The publication was precisely the wild potpourri that Munsey had promised. There were 134 different items in the first issue, under such headings as "The Latest Viewpoints of Men Worth While," "Beginnings of Stage Careers," "Biography," and "Poetry," with special features including "Roosevelt and the Labor Unions," "Our Trade Triumphs in 1905," "What the Prophets Say about 1906," "Dress for All Occasions," "The Progress of Women," and "Winter Photography for Amateurs," along with numerous jokes, anecdotes, fillers, and all the diffuse literary paraphernalia usually found in scrapbooks.

Munsey printed five hundred thousand copies of the first issue and claimed that they sold out. Some credence was given to his claim when the second issue appeared printed on an excellent grade of book paper, which even after sixty-four years shows little signs of aging. The June, 1906, issue of THE ARGOSY carried a house ad signed by Robert H. Davis offering cash for old scrapbooks: "Collections of poetry, humor, interesting statistical data, strange happenings, animal stories, curiosities in literature, biographical, etc., especially desired." Evidently the magazine intended to make up a substantial part of its contents from actual scrapbooks.

An apparently happy state of affairs and sales continued until the June, 1907, issue, when Frank A. Munsey was hit by one of the most bizarre publishing brainstorms of all time. "The new idea, in a word," he wrote, "is the publishing of a magazine in two sections—two complete magazines, each with its own cover, and yet each bearing the same name, and being a part of the whole. The two magazines are to be sold as one, precisely as in the case of the Sunday newspaper with its varying sections."

Munsey referred pointedly to the tremendous competition now building in the all-fiction pulp field that had been all his own for a while. He said that economic pressures were forcing costs of magazines upward and that the ten-cent price, which had created the mass audience, could not survive much longer.

The July, 1907, issue of THE SCRAP BOOK appeared in two sections. The first section was 180 pages on coated stock with at least as many illustrations and halftones as pages. The entire content was nonfiction and poetry, and there was a fascinating variety of features. The second section was all fiction, printed 192 pages on book paper, with a colored pictorial cover. The stories were both new and reprints.

The one problem was that the customer had to buy both sections for twenty-five cents, and a quarter of a dollar was a lot of money in 1907. While it had seemed to be a good idea to have a magazine that two people could read simultaneously, it also turned out that many readers were not interested in one or the other of the sections and wouldn't invest twenty-five cents just to get the section they wanted. The result was a circulation disaster; sales fell off in great gobs of forty thousand and fifty thousand an issue. The Great Experiment had failed! The cover of the September, 1908, nonfiction First Section stated: "Beginning with the October number, THE SCRAP BOOK will be printed in colors and issued in one part only—The price will be ten cents a copy."

In creating the two-part magazine, Munsey had editorialized that the day of the specialized magazine was fast arriving and that people were tired of purchasing an entire periodical just to get one or two things that interested them. He was quite evidently sincere in that appraisal, for on September 15, 1906, he distributed the October issue of THE RAILROAD MAN'S MAGAZINE, a 192-page ten-cent pulp, just as heavy on the fiction as on the fact, copiously illustrated, and aimed directly at a relatively narrow audience. Despite a quantity of factual material, the appearance of this magazine was a landmark event, for it was the first truly specialized pulp magazine, a forerunner of the detective, western, love-story, air, and science-fiction pulps to come.

That was followed by an even more remarkable experiment, THE OCEAN, whose first issue was dated March, 1907. It was a magazine of sea stories with some nonfiction, printed on pulp paper, 192 pages for ten cents. It would run eleven issues through to January, 1908, and seven of those issues would carry science fiction. The first issue led off with a four-part novel,
Sea Gold
, by George Bronson-Howard, a popular contributor to adventure magazines, with a story of a man who discovers how to make gold and the efforts of the "Trust Trust" to gain exclusivity of the secret. The August issue ran a short,
The Passing of the Waters
, by Edwin C. Dickinson, in which the United States Navy is sunk by a superior enemy fleet which then goes steaming through the Panama Canal. An engineer blows up a key dam, releasing the waters from the artificial lakes, leaving the enemy's ships stranded in the mud. The most interesting story it printed was the two-part serial
In the Land of Tomorrow
, by Epos Winthrop Sargent, of an island, some hundreds of miles off New Zealand, where those scientists are welcomed whose outstanding inventions have been refused by the world. Marriage is not permitted, for the children from the union of men and women scientists frequently prove physically defective. On Century Island there is weather control, electricity from radioactivity, electric cooking, and thermostatically controlled baths. While the plot is old, focusing about two lovers building an airplane to escape the island, the story is a superior piece of work for its period, particularly in its effective writing.

The audience of THE OCEAN proved too limited, so it was discontinued with the January, 1908, number and resumed as THE LIVE WIRE with the February issue. THE LIVE WIRE was a fabulous pulp. Like all the others, 192 pages for ten cents, it undoubtedly was the first pulp magazine and maybe the only one to run all illustrations, one hundred fifty or more of them in each issue, in two colors. Frank A. Munsey had bought some new two-color presses and was using THE LIVE WIRE as an experimental publication, and it was a joy to thumb through page after page of articles, stories, poems, and cartoons, all illustrated profusely, all well drawn, and all with a second color. The contents were very similar to those of the early issues of THE SCRAP BOOK.

The eight issues of THE LIVE WIRE contained a number of tales of science fiction.
The Great Scourge of the World
, by H. A. and G. A. Thompson (May, 1908), told of the attempts by a scientist to specifically destroy the poverty-stricken and miserable of the world with a direct-contact gas spray that produced the effects of the Black Plague, but whose effects were non-contagious.
The Great Baseball Brainstorm of 2002
(June, 1908), by B. Bulger, is one of the earlier if not the earliest sports story of the far future.
The Burning Image
, by Crittendon Marriott, which began in the July, 1908, number, was a six-part novel which begins as a cloak-and-dagger murder mystery and ends in a confrontation with a fantastic Mayan god. Marriott was an important early mystery-story writer who occasionally dabbled in science fiction.

THE SCRAP BOOK had been a split personality, and its conversion back to a single monthly magazine was equally schizophrenic. The title of the fiction section was changed to THE CAVALIER, which began life with the October, 1908, issue. Five uncompleted serials from THE SCRAP BOOK were resumed by THE CAVALIER, which at first ran on book paper, 192 pages for ten cents. The boost in a carryover in readers who are hung up on five serials was its initial sales impetus.

The nonfiction section of THE SCRAP BOOK incorporated THE LIVE WIRE with its October, 1908, issue, carrying on that magazine's uncompleted serials. The tasteful covers were back, the fiction was back, and so were the scores of odds and ends that had previously been an integral part of the magazine. Additionally,
all
the illustrations in Tin; SCRAP BOOK now appeared in two and three colors, which showed up dramatically on the book-paper stock used.

THE SCRAP BOOK had used a limited amount of science fiction and supernatural tales previously, including reprints of Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, Washington Irving, E. Bulwer-Lytton, Daniel Defoe, and an excerpt of
Frankenstein's Monster
(February, 1907) from Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's famous novel. The most interesting of the new stories were
The Human Brick
, by Mark C. Francis (October, 1907), where the ashes of a cremated man are made into a brick and he retains consciousness after becoming part of an apartment house;
When Science Warred
, by Julian Johnson (November, 1907), in which an old French scientist permits plague germs to enter a gale heading toward Germany, to forestall an invasion by that nation;
The Avatar
, by Harvey J. O'Higgins, which finds a student with a head injury suffering lapses in which he writes manuscripts in Monk Latin; and
The Thing Behind the Curtain
, by Charles Stephens (May-July, 1908), relating the invention of a machine for transmitting and receiving thought waves with an intensity so effective it can temporarily activate cadavers.

The year 1909 saw THE SCRAP BOOK place greater emphasis on science fiction, with several important authors making novel-length contributions. Editor Sheehan had paid Garrett P. Serviss four hundred dollars for his sixty-five thousand word novel of an air-buccaneer operation in the year 1936 titled
The Sky Pirate
. Compared to
The Columbus of Space
, which was still running in THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE,
The Sky Pirate
(April-September, 1909) showed a paucity of imagination, with a girl kidnapped by air, and running battles between planes not capable of doing over one hundred forty miles per hour. The actual writing was smooth, and the story was easy to read, though it would never be reprinted.

Serviss' serial was followed by George Allan England's first long science-fiction tale,
The House of Transformation
(September-November, 1909), dealing with the use of extensive and advanced surgery to turn a gorilla into a man.

With the July, 1909, issue, THE SCRAP BOOK had dropped its family-type cover and gone back to straight title and the blazoning of the feature story, with at best a tiny line cut. During 1910, in size and advertising it gave the outward appearance of prosperity and success, but by 1911, it switched back to pulp paper and not only dropped interior illustrations in color but also dropped all art. Though the quality of the stories and articles remained good, there was less variety. Outstanding during this last year of its regular publication was
Monsieur De Guise
, (January, 1911), by the magazine's editor, Perley Poore Sheehan, a masterfully poignant ghost story of a great Southern mansion on an island in a cedar swamp, and an old man who sits in luxurious splendid isolation and recalls the spirit of his dead wife to sing for a guest a sweet love song in French. George Allan England's
The Man with the Glass Heart
(May, 1911) was a brilliant anticipation of today's surgical experiments, written with considerable skill.

THE CAVALIER started from Volume 1, Number 1 in its October, 1908, issue, even though it carried THE SCRAP BOOK'S serials. Editorship had been turned over to Robert H. Davis. The first few issues continued the fine book paper, but it was changed to pulp in 1909. The tastefully handsome covers, patterned after THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE and THE POPULAR MAGAZINE, were carried into 1910. The stories were unillustrated.

No time was lost in presenting science fiction,
World Wreckers
, by Frank Lillie Pollock, appearing in the November, 1908, issue. A short novel of a scientist who invents a method of manufacturing gold and is kidnapped by a group who work to use the metal to take over the world, it is easy to read. The preoccupation of writers of the turn of the century in dealing with the possibility of the conversion of baser metals to gold is so intensive that a fourth-year thesis by a sociology major on the theme might prove illuminating.

Following the lead of THE POPULAR MAGAZINE almost four years earlier, THE CAVALIER secured first American rights to a novel by H. Rider Haggard. THE CAVALIER badly needed a circulation winner. It was a good magazine, but by 1910 there were a lot of good magazines, and more being added.

THE POPULAR MAGAZINE had gone twice a month for a three-month experimental period with its October, 1909, issue. It was the same as adding another potent competitor. THE POPULAR MAGAZINE was edging close to four hundred thousand monthly circulation. It was the biggest pulp magazine on the stands, with 224 pages, and if the readers could be trained to buy two issues a month there were bound to be tens of thousands who had bought a second or third magazine who would drop it for the additional issue of THE POPULAR MAGAZINE. These implications boded no good for the supremacy of THE ARGOSY, which had reached a peak of over five hundred thousand copies monthly in 1907 and had begun to decline under the press of competition. The big selling point that THE ARGOSY had was its five to seven serials. THE POPULAR MAGAZINE as a semimonthly would negate that factor. It had long been publishing a complete 50,000-to-70,000-word novel every issue. Now its readers would have to wait only half the usual time between installments of its serials.