THE PULP CALENDAR: December 7

If December 7 seems early for a Christmas cover, consider that this 1928 issue of The Popular Magazine  from Street & Smith, is also its "Early January" issue for 1929 as well as its Holiday Number. This tells us both how soon the issue hit newsstands and how long it was expected to stay there. The Popular had been weekly earlier in 1928 but had recently retrenched to twice-a-month, the cover dates being the 7th and the 20th. It seems also to have jumped in page count from 144 to 176 pages per issue. Of the authors, I'm more or less familiar with two of them, Fred MacIsaac and Henry Herbert Knibbs, but the others, including two poets, are mysteries to me. Thomas Boyd, who wrote the lead novel, worked mostly in the slicks, while A. M. Chisolm, W. B. M. Ferguson and William Hemmingway who by this time appeared almost exclusively in The Popular. Holiday content includes Ferguson's "Merry Christmas" and Willard E. Solenberger's poem "Christmas on the Trail." I suspect I'll have better luck finding Christmas-themed covers than I've had for other holidays, but we'll see.