THE PULP CALENDAR: January 27

There's only one thing you can say about this 1940 cover: that was a close shave! And that's practically the only thing I can say about this issue of Western Story, which I picked for today only because it had the most interesting cover of any pulp with this day on the Calendar. Veteran western writers dominate this number, including cover author W. Ryerson Johnson, Harry Sinclair Drago and Gunnison Steele. Seth Ranger's in the middle of the serial that began back on January 13, and it's unusual to see him in an issue without his alter ego Frank Richardson Pierce contributing something, too. All these writers I've at least heard of; I can't really say that about short story contributors George Cory Franklin and Joseph F. Hook. At this point in 1940 Western Story gave you the same number of pages per week as Argosy, but that wouldn't last much longer. Argosy would soon shrink to 112 pages while Western Story kept putting out 128 pages a week for another three years.