THE PULP CALENDAR: February 10

Here's a Short Stories from 1932, spotlighting a Foreign Legion novel, apparently set in China, by one of the genre's masters, J. D. Newsom. I'll have more to say about Newsom when I show you my Feb. 16, 1935 Argosy, but let me assure you that giving him the cover story probably makes this Short Stories worth getting all by itself. Notice how the cover copy emphasizes the globetrotting scope of the magazine's contents. Sometimes Short Stories is too heavy on westerns, but that's not the case here. Among the other authors R. V. Gery,who has a novelet, and Sinclair Gluck, who's in the middle of a serial, are solid if not top-tier writers. This is an ambitious period for the twice-monthly pulp. Little more than a month from this date, Short Stories would expand to a whopping 224 pages, making it bigger than the 192 page Adventure. At the end of August, Short Stories retreated back to its previous 176 page size, but at that same time Adventure suddenly shrunk by half, to 96 pages; it went monthly the following year. If the Short Stories plan had been to break Adventure by intensifying their biweekly competition at the trough of the Depression, it seems to have worked. Short Stories stayed "Twice a Month" until 1949.