From “The Offal of the Magazine Trade” to “Absolutely Priceless”: Considering the Canadian Pulp Magazine Collection

Abstract

The other day I went into one of the stores in Ottawa to see just how bad the situation was here. In the store, forty-six different kinds of this trash were offered for sale. This is the of the magazine No one should have to buy it. No one should be able to buy it. T. H. Goode, Member of Parliament, 1949 This diverse range of magazines and paper-books, complemented by the behind-the-covers production materials and other archival documentation, creates an opportunity to study Canada's emerging publishing industry. Michel Brisebois, Rare Book Historian for the National Library of Canada, 2002 IN 1949, MEMBER OF PARLIAMENT T. H. GOODE exhorted the Federal Government of Canada to make the sale of both pulp magazines and comic books illegal. Most Members of Parliament concurred with Goode's exhortation. Positing that the violence and questionable morality associated with pulp fiction and comic-book tales could damage young readers, the Federal Government chose to criminalize the production, sale, and even ownership of pulps and comics. These restrictions eradicated Canadian pulps from the nation's literary landscape by both preventing the production of new materials and discouraging the preservation of existing ones. In 1996, however, the National Library of Canada purchased a former pulp publisher's archive; this archive now constitutes the only known collection of Canadian pulp magazines. Celebrating their rarity, the Library created a public exhibition in 2002 that was designed to showcase the pulps as artefacts that provide absolutely priceless insight into a nearly-forgotten era of Canadian publishing. Clearly, this treatment of the pulps contradicts the 1949 government decision to ban the offal of the magazine trade. The radical disparity between the perception of the Canadian pulps in 1949 and their current vogue raises the question of cultural legitimacy, the question of how literary value is negotiated by governments, institutions, and readers, as well as how these values can change over time. In this paper, I trace the combination of social, economic, moral, and artistic rationales that determined the low cultural value of pulp magazines during the 1940s; I then go on to consider both the material rarity and perceived importance to social and cultural history that underpin the pulps' elevated cultural status as an archive at a national institution. (1) Part One: The Offal of the Magazine Trade For the first four decades of the twentieth century, Canada imported vast quantities of American pulp magazines. These magazines generated and popularized formulaic genre fiction; indeed, Lee Server argues that the pulp-created genres--science fiction, horror, private eye, Western, superhero--now dominate not only popular literature but every sort of mass entertainment, from movies and television to comic books. This legacy will remain long after the last of the pulp magazines themselves--haphazardly saved and physically unsuited for preservation--have all turned to dust. (15) Part of their ethos, however, was grounded in representing acts of violence and risque scenarios that were met with widespread moral disapproval. From a material vantage, several elements of the pulps suggested that they were a form of printed trash. They were mass-produced on cheap pulp paper that was prone to rapid disintegration and bound with staples that rusted and fell out over time. In terms of their perceived literary quality, the stories that filled the magazines were penned by authors who were commonly referred to as hacks, and the pulp audience consisted primarily of working-class readers. By circulating within this class, the pulps were associated with a low social class in a way that further solidified their status as low literature (see Figure 16). That said, pulp magazines were a great success in the commercial sense: they attracted a large audience, thereby ensuring that thousands of pulp periodicals were distributed and sold in Canada each month. …