THE PULP CALENDAR: September 2

For variety's sake, here's a West from 1931, when the Doubleday, Doran pulp was a biweekly. That meant readers would get three issues that September compared to only two of West's stablemate, the twice-a-month Short Stories. I haven't much to say about the contributors except that some were familiar names to genre fans of the time; [William] Colt MacDonald, Allan K. Echols, Frank C. Robertson and Charles W. Tyler, for instance, though there's also a one-time-only author here named Hunter Eaton. In all such instances, however, you might guess that Eaton really was one of the aforementioned writers getting a second story into the issue. I picked this one mainly because I thought the blue-green sky of William Reusswig's cover contrasted nicely with West's sunbeam banner. By the way, this issue is the first appearance of the cover hero, George C. Shedd's Ben Pickering, in the FictionMags Index, but I'd guess he wouldn't be called by name on the cover if he hadn't appeared before.