Argosy (magazine)

In the late 1870s, Frank Munsey was working in Augusta, Maine, as the manager of the Western Union office there. He helped a friend get a job at a publisher in Augusta, and after a couple of years his friend moved to New York City to another publishing company. Munsey was becoming more familiar with the publishing industry during this time, and decided he wanted to launch a magazine of his own. He had some difficulty in getting anyone to agree to invest, but eventually persuaded a stockbroker he knew to put in $2,500, of which $500 was a loan to Munsey. Munsey invested $500 of his own, and his friend in New York City added another $1,000, making a total of $4,000 in capital.[1][2] Munsey resigned from Western Union, and moved to New York on September 23, 1882, bringing with him manuscripts he had bought for the magazine before leaving Augusta.[3]

Frank Munsey

Once in New York, Munsey quickly realized that the cost estimates he had made, based on what he had been able to learn while in Maine, were unrealistically low.[4][5] His original plan for the magazine had been to make it a close copy of Golden Days, a juvenile weekly paper published in Philadelphia by James Elverson,[6] and to include lithographed covers and internal illustrations.[4][5] He abandoned these ideas and came up with a simplified approach, still based on Golden Days, that he believed could be made profitable. He wrote to the stockbroker who had promised $2,500 to get the funds sent to him, but received no reply, and since this made it impossible to start the magazine as planned, Munsey released his New York friend from his promise of investment. This left Munsey with only about $40, along with the manuscripts he had in hand, which had cost over $500 to acquire. He began looking for a publisher who would back the new magazine, and eventually persuaded E. G. Rideout to take it on. The first issue, titled The Golden Argosy, with Munsey as editor and manager, was dated December 9, 1882;[4][5] it was eight pages long and cost five cents.[7] Subscribers were offered a set of colored chromolithographs along with their subscription.[4]

Five months later Rideout went bankrupt. Munsey had not drawn all his salary, and Rideout had borrowed money from him as well, so he was owed about $1,000 by the bankrupt company. He claimed the magazine's title and subscription list in return for his debt, succeeding over a competing claim from a publisher who would have merged the magazine's subscriptions into those of his own publication.[8][9][10] The first issue with Munsey as publisher was dated September 8, 1883.[11] Munsey again was reduced to a few dollars, but he was able to borrow $300 from Oscar Holway, a banker in Augusta who was a friend.[8][9] At about this time he bought some stories from Malcolm Douglas, but when Douglas came to collect his payment Munsey offered him the job of editor, at $10 per week, in lieu of payment for the stories. Douglas accepted.[8]

A friend from Augusta, John Fogler, who had become cashier of Augusta's First National Bank, was able to arrange another loan for Munsey, of $1,000.[15] Munsey kept to the weekly schedule without missing an issue, but the financial pressure on him was enormous.[16][17] Rideout had set up Munsey in an office on Barclay Street in what is now known as Tribeca, in Manhattan; Munsey moved to an office on Warren Street nearby to reduce the rent, and he and Douglas would eat in a German beer saloon where they could get a free lunch. Munsey and Douglas assembled free material by rewriting items from English boys' papers. One week, Douglas was unable to find enough material to fill an issue. Munsey wrote a short story that night: "Harry's Scheme, or Camping Among the Maples", about two boys in the Maine woods, and turned it in to Douglas the next morning.[note 2] Douglas twice saw Munsey write a letter to Elverson, offering the subscription list of The Golden Argosy in return for a job at $50 per week, but Munsey did not mail either letter.[16][17]

In 1884 James Blaine was the Republican candidate for President. Blaine knew of Munsey from Augusta, and his campaign needed help with publicity: Munsey proposed a new magazine, Munsey's Illustrated Weekly, to carry campaign news. It only lasted two months, from September 6 to November 8, 1884, but it helped Munsey by giving him an official-seeming presence in publishing that made it much easier for him to obtain credit for paper and other supplies.[19] Before the campaign he had been unable to get credit; after it he was $8,000 in debt to his suppliers. Ten years later Munsey recalled the change, and said "That debt made me. Before, I had no credit and had to live from hand to mouth. But when I owed $8,000 my creditors didn't dare drop me. They saw their only chance of getting anything was to keep me going."[20] Munsey had a bank account in New York, but kept two more, in Maine and Chicago, moving funds between them constantly: "I kept thousands of dollars in the air between these three banks. It was a dizzy, dazzling, daring game, a game to live for, to die for, a royal glorious game".[21] Munsey told a story of being unable to meet payroll because the New York bank would not give him credit. He went to the bank, upbraided the president for his "effrontery", and left without letting the man speak.[21] When his employee went to the bank again that day, he was able to cash the payroll check.[21]

The fact that The Golden Argosy never missed an issue also helped Munsey persuade the businesses he worked with to extend him credit, which in turn helped him invest in the business. In the winter of 1885/1886 he wrote a serial, Afloat in a Great City, with the intention of using it as the basis for an advertising campaign to increase subscriptions. Munsey owed $5,000 at this point, and went into debt by about another $10,000 in order to advertise the story, distributing 100,000 sample copies of the March 13, 1886 issue containing the first instalment of the serial in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the surrounding areas. The campaign was a success, and from being a more-or-less breakeven concern, The Golden Argosy began to net Munsey about $100 a week in profit, not counting the cost of the campaign. This convinced Munsey to invest further in building circulation.[22][23] A new editor, Matthew White, took over from Douglas at the end of the year.[8] At the same time Munsey doubled the page count and increased the price from five cents to six,[22][24][25] and in 1887 he began a national advertising campaign, with traveling representatives as far west as Nebraska, and a mail campaign for points further west.[23] He wrote another story, The Boy Broker, for serialization, beginning in the February 5, 1887 issue,[23][26] and credited it with adding 20,000 to The Golden Argosy's circulation.[23][27] Over five months the campaign gave out 11,500,000 sample issues: his debt ballooned to $95,000, but he was now clearing $1,500 a week in profit, and circulation reached 115,000 in May 1887.[23][28][note 3]

The improvement in Munsey's finances was temporary, though before Munsey realized it he had given up his cheap rooms and moved to the Windsor Hotel on Fifth Avenue.[32] Another advertising campaign was launched; it cost $20,000 but produced no results, and Munsey began to experiment with the magazine, trying to find a profitable approach. He shortened the title to just The Argosy with the December 1, 1888 issue to make it sound more like an adventure magazine and less like a children's paper.[32][33][14] He later commented that he had not realized the problems attendant on magazines for children—they grew up quickly and dropped their subscriptions, so circulation was very difficult to maintain, and because they had little spending power it was hard to interest advertisers.[34] He reduced the page size and increased the page count, and added illustrated covers, and cut the price, and then reversed all these changes, but nothing worked.[32] In 1890 circulation dropped to the point where it no longer covered its own costs.[35] The expenses Munsey had taken on after the successful campaign in 1887 were now a drain, and when his friend Fogler visited, and was impressed that Munsey was living at the Windsor, he told Fogler, "I can't afford it ... but it is a means to an end. It gives me standing to have the acquaintance of the men I meet here."[32] Fogler also discovered on that visit that Munsey had bought a pew in a popular church for $1,000 a year.[32]

Munsey launched two more periodicals, hoping that they would establish themselves as profitable before The Argosy failed completely.[36] The first was Munsey's Weekly, launched on February 2, 1889;[36][37] the second was a newspaper, the Daily Continent, which he took over in February 1891 and gave up on four months later.[36][38] The Weekly was not a success either, and in late 1891 Munsey converted it into a monthly, titled Munsey's Magazine, priced at 25 cents. Fogler, now working for a bank in Kansas, arranged a loan for Munsey that grew to $8,000, with half Munsey's stock as collateral. In the Panic of 1893 the bank called in the loan, and Munsey offered Fogler the stock if he would take over the loan. Fogler declined, and Munsey had to arrange for another loan at 18% interest to cover the repayment.[36] In October 1893 Munsey cut the price of Munsey's Magazine to 10 cents. He had to struggle to distribute it at this price, since the American News Company had a monopoly on magazine distribution and had little interest in a low-priced magazine. By the February issue Munsey was printing 200,000 copies, and it soon became successful enough to guarantee his financial security.[39]

The Argosy did not share in the success of Munsey's Magazine; circulation continued to decline, but Munsey kept it going, as he later said, "as a matter of sentiment", and to see what could be made of it. From a high of 115,000 the circulation fell to 9,000 for the March 24, 1894 issue, which was the last one as a weekly. Munsey switched it to monthly publication with the April issue, and circulation jumped to 40,000 immediately, but went no higher for over two years.[40] With the October 1896 issue Munsey changed it to carry fiction only, targeted at adults rather than children; it was the first magazine to print only fiction.[40][31][12] Starting with the December issue he began printing it on cheap wood-pulp paper,[40][31] making The Argosy the first pulp magazine.[30] The all-fiction format brought about another jump in circulation to 80,000.[40] In 1898, with circulation still at around 80,000, Munsey bought Peterson's Magazine and merged it into The Argosy.[40][41] A year or so later circulation began to climb again: Munsey spent nothing on advertising, but circulation reached 300,000 in 1902, and hit half a million in 1907, 25 years after it was launched.[40] The magazine absorbed two other Munsey publications, The Puritan and Junior Munsey, in 1902, and Munsey credited some of the increase in circulation to the merger.[42]

The Argosy's circulation fell from this peak, and it returned to a weekly schedule in 1917.[12][14] In 1906 Munsey had started The Railroad Man's Magazine, which carried both fiction and non-fiction; after the January 18, 1919 issue it was merged into The Argosy, which was retitled Argosy and Railroad Man's Magazine briefly, reverting to just Argosy with the May 31 issue.[44][45][46] Paper shortages caused by World War I forced a reduction in the page count of both The Argosy and All-Story Weekly, another Munsey fiction magazine, and costs continued to go up after the war. Most of the other major fiction magazines of the day increased their price to at twenty cents; Top-Notch Magazine was a holdout at fifteen cents, but Munsey kept both Argosy and All-Story at ten cents. In 1920 he merged All-Story Weekly into The Argosy, explaining that this let him keep the price of the combined magazine at ten cents, while saving "all the cost of stories in one magazine, all the cost of the editorial force, all the cost of typesetting, all the cost of making electrotype plates, and many other minor costs".[47] The low price, sustained through most of the 1920s, must have been a strong benefit to circulation, which is reported to have reached half a million when the combined magazine, now titled Argosy All-Story Weekly, debuted, and stayed at about 400,000 during the following decade.[47] The first issue of the new magazine added pages to allow it to carry continuations of the serials that had been running in each of the two magazines before the merger, and Sam Moskowitz, a magazine historian, comments that this approach "was such that it is doubtful that a single nonduplicating reader was lost from either magazine".[47] The page count gradually dropped again as the serials were completed, from 224 after the merger to 144 at the end of the year.[47]

In 1925 Munsey died. The Frank A. Munsey Corporation, which continued as the publisher, was sold to Thomas Dewart, who had been working for Munsey.[30][48][49][14] Matthew White, who had been editor since 1886, was finally replaced by A. H. Bittner in 1928. Bittner lasted for three years as editor; his successors throughout the 1930s only lasted a year or two each.[12] In October 1929 Munsey's Magazine and Argosy All-Story Weekly were combined and immediately split again into two magazines: one was titled All-Story Combined with Munsey's, and the other continued as Argosy.[50][44]

In 1932 Don Moore, who had become editor in July 1931,[51][52] bought two stories from Frank Morgan Mercer that turned out to have been copied from earlier stories by H. Bedford-Jones and James Francis Dwyer. Up to this point Argosy paid on acceptance; because of the plagiarism the policy was changed to pay new authors only after publication, to allow plagiarism to be detected.[53][54][55]

Moore left to work at Cosmopolitan in mid-1934, and was replaced by Frederick Clayton, who had been associate editor.[56] In 1936 Clayton was hired by Liberty, and Jack Byrne, who had been working at Fiction House, took over as editor for a year before being replaced by Chandler Whipple.[57][58] Another Munsey magazine, All-American Fiction, was merged into Argosy in 1938.[59][44] In 1939 Whipple resigned and George Post, who had been part of Whipple's editorial team, became editor.[60][61]

Argosy remained a weekly until the October 4, 1941 issue, then switched to an irregular schedule with two issues a month.[62] Post left in early 1942, and was briefly replaced by Harry Gray and then for two issues by Burroughs Mitchell.[43][63][12]

In September 1942 Popular Publications, a pulp magazine publisher, bought all the Munsey pulp magazine titles from Dewart, including Argosy,[49][64] which by this time had a circulation of only 40,000 to 50,000.[30][65][66][67][note 4] The new editor was Rogers Terrill. Argosy ceased to use pulp paper from 1943, becoming a slick magazine.[68][69] In early 1944 Harry Steeger, the owner of Popular, took over the editorship for five years,[12] hiring Jerry Mason away from This Week in 1949 to replaced himself as editor.[12][70] Mason stayed for four years; when he left in mid-1953 Howard Lewis was promoted to editor from executive editor.[71][72] Lewis resigned in 1954, and Ken Purdy, the editor of Argosy's main rival, True, was hired,[65][66][73] but stayed less than a year.[12] James O'Connell, who had been fiction editor of Argosy since 1948,[12][74] was editor for one issue, dated October 1954, and then Steeger took the editing chair again.[12][70] Circulation prospered under Popular, reaching 600,000 in June 1948, and 1.25 million by 1954.[66][67] This growth was aided by some lucky publicity, broadcast to millions of radio listeners: after the acquisition by Popular, Argosy was the subject of a question on the popular Take It or Leave It radio show, which referred to it as a pulp magazine. Two weeks later the show's host apologized, and asked the studio audience to chant "Argosy is a slick" on the air.[67][75]

Argosy's circulation remained over a million until at least 1973,[65][76] and the advertising revenue this provided made the magazine an attractive acquisition target.[77] Steeger sold Popular Publications to David Geller's Brookside Publications in 1972.[77][78] In early January 1978 Geller sold the company to the Filipacchi Group.[77][79][80] The last issue from Popular was dated November/December 1978.[68] Four more monthly issues appeared from August to November 1979, published by Lifetime Wholesalers, Inc.[12][68]

In addition to the monthly issues, between 1975 and 1978 Argosy published about fifty special issues on specific topics such as sharks, basketball, guns, or treasure hunting. There were also two associated magazines: Argosy UFO appeared in July 1976 and ceased publication with its eighth issue, dated Winter 1977/1978; and Argosy Gun produced at least four issues between Fall 1977 and Summer 1978.[44]

The magazine has been revived three times since then. Between 1989 and 1994, six issues were produced by Richard Kyle, at irregular intervals.[81] Three more issues, dated in 2004 and 2005, appeared from Lou Anders and James A. Owen, with the third issue edited by Owen alone, and retitled Argosy Quarterly. One more issue, from Altus Press, appeared in 2016,[12][81] edited by Matthew Moring.[82]

Cover of The Golden Argosy for May 19, 1883, featuring the first instalment of Hector's Inheritance by Horatio Alger

The first issue of The Golden Argosy included the first instalment of two novels: Do and Dare, or a Brave Boy's Fight for a Fortune, by Horatio Alger, which took the cover page, and Nick and Nellie, or God Helps them that Helps Themselves, by Edward S. Ellis. There were also short stories and some non-fiction. The target audience was both boys and girls, from ten to twenty years old.[83][14] When Munsey began to write serialized novels for the magazine, starting with Afloat in a Great City in 1886, he used the same basic plot that Alger had been successful with: rags to riches stories of boys succeeding against the odds.[16] Other early serials were boys' adventure tales, occasionally with science fiction ideas such as lost races. Multiple serials often ran simultaneously.[12] Early contributors included Harry Castlemon, whose Don Gordon's Shooting-Box began serialization in the March 3, 1883 issue;[14][84] Frank H. Converse, who in addition to an early serial (A Voyage to the Gold Coast, or Jack Bond's Quest, beginning in the March 24, 1883 issue) had several short stories in the first couple of years of the magazine;[14][85] Oliver Optic, (Making a Man of Himself, beginning in the October 20, 1883 issue),[14][86] and G. A. Henty (Facing Peril: A Tale of the Coal Mines, from September 5, 1885).[14][87]

The magazine's subtitle, "Freighted with Treasures for Boys and Girls" was dropped in 1886, though the contents were still aimed at the same youthful readers as before.[14] P. T. Barnum's Dick Broadhead: a Story of Wild Animals and the Circus was serialized from May to August 1887.[14][88] There was little science fiction in the early years; one exception was The Conquest of the Moon, by Andre Laurie, which began serialization in The Argosy in 1889;[31] another was William Murray Graydon's The River of Darkness; or, Under Africa (1890). "When the Redcoats Came to Bennington", an early story by Upton Sinclair, appeared in the December 1895 issue.[14][89]

Cover of the August 15, 1925 issue

After the change to an all-fiction monthly format in 1896, The Argosy was a men's and boy's adventure magazine,[14] though The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction describes many of the serials in the first decade or so after the change as "still only a little above juvenile adventure stories".[12] In 1926, Albert William Stone, a fairly prolific pulp author, visited Manhattan to meet with the editors of the various magazines he had been selling to, and find out more about what their requirements were for submissions.[90] Stone had sold several stories to Bob Davis, the editor of All-Story Weekly, before its merger with The Argosy, but had never sold to Matthew White, who had been editor of The Argosy since before the change to pulp format.[91][12] White had sent Stone an encouraging note in reply to an early submission of his: "Two things I like about this story are its Western atmosphere, and its brevity—two thousand five hundred words ... If those hints are of any value to you, try us again."[91] In the interview with Stone, White expanded upon what he was looking for. "I require yarns ... that violate the traditions relative to 'logical development'. By this I mean that I do not want the story developed in what is commonly called the 'natural' way. I require unexpected development—surprises at every turn it is possible to have them without destroying the convincingness of the story ... In other words, stories that are a constant challenge to the author's inventive ability, one situation after another, and that keep the writer perspiring freely."[92]

Ed Hulse, a historian of pulp magazines, while generally praising the quality of the fiction in Argosy during the pulp era, comments that during the 1920s some "bland, conventional dramas" appeared in the magazine, by writers such as Edgar Franklin, Isabel Ostrander, and E. J. Rath. Hulse suggests that this editorial policy was aimed at attracting more women readers to the magazine.[93]

After White's editorship, and for the next fifteen years, the requirements that Argosy's editors sent to writers' magazines such as Writer's Digest and Author & Journalist emphasized that they were looking for stories focused on action, with a masculine point of view. Bittner's comments in 1928 asked for "any good clean story with sound plot, rapid-fire action and strong masculine appeal will be considered", and gave a long list of genres all of which were acceptable—even romance so long as "the love element is not unduly stressed".[94] In 1931 Moore outlined the stories to be excluded: "love or domestic tales, sex stories, stories with a predominant woman interest or told from a woman’s viewpoint".[95] In 1935 Clayton provided a list of hackneyed plots to be avoided, including escaping convicts, an underwater adventure in which the hero fights an octopus and a giant clam as well as the villain, and a legionnaire who "dies gloriously for Dear Old France".[96] The policy of action stories told from a male viewpoint continued through the rest of the decade.[97][98][99][100][101]

Cover of the October 1905 issue

Many writers who later became well-known sold to The Argosy early in their careers. William MacLeod Raine's first story, "The Luck of Eustace Blount", appeared in the March 1899 issue.[102][103] William Wallace Cook contributed numerous serials in the first decade of the 20th century, beginning with The Spur of Necessity in the September 1900 issue after half-a-dozen sales to other markets.[104][105] Cook wrote adventure fiction with elements of satire, an unusual combination for the pulps.[106] James Branch Cabell's first sale was to The Argosy; his "An Amateur Ghost" appeared in the February 1902 issue.[107][108] William Hamilton Osborne's first sale was also to The Argosy, but after paying for it White returned the story to Osborne as the plot was too similar to other stories that had appeared elsewhere. It did eventually appear in the New York Daily News, but Osborne's first appearance in print was in The Argosy with "Turner's Luck with Rouge et Noir", in the September 1902 issue.[109][110] Louis Joseph Vance, the creator of the character The Lone Wolf, published most of his fiction in The Popular Magazine, but his first two sales were to Munsey, including The Coil of Circumstance, a serial that began in the November 1903 Argosy.[111][112] Albert Payson Terhune, later the author of Lad: A Dog, frequently published in the Munsey magazines early in his career.[113][114] His first sale to The Argosy was "The Fugitive", a novella that began serialization in the August 1905 issue, and he sold a dozen more stories to the magazine over the next few years.[113] An early story by Mary Roberts Rinehart, "The Misadventures of a Pearl Necklace", appeared in February the following year.[115]

Cover for the story "The Metal Monster" by A. Merritt (August 7, 1920)

The first pulp issue, in December 1896, included a science fiction story, "Citizen 504", by C. H. Palmer, and science fiction featured regularly thereafter.[31] Five science fiction adventure novels by William Wallace Cook appeared, starting in 1903 with A Round Trip to the Year 2000, or A Flight Through Time. Lost race stories continued to appear, such as Frank Aubrey's A Queen of Atlantis (1899), Frank Savile's Beyond the Great South Wall (1899–1900),[12] and Perley Poore Sheehan's The Abyss of Wonders (1915), described by Hulse as "arguably the finest lost race novel ever to appear in a Munsey magazine".[116] Francis Stevens contributed another lost world novel, The Citadel of Fear, in 1918.[116]

Humorous stories about scientific inventions were another theme.[12] Howard Rogert Garis began selling to Argosy in 1904; his "Professor Jonkin" stories were lighthearted examples of the genre,[117] and other examples came from H.D. Smiley, whose "Bagley's Coagulated Cyclone" and "Bagley's Rain-Machine" appeared in the September 1906 and February 1907 issues.[118][119] Some more sophisticated science fiction also appeared, including "Finis", an end of the world story by Frank Lillie Pollock, in June 1906.[12][120] George Griffith, an important early science fiction writer from the UK, published almost none of his work in the US in his lifetime. The only exception was The Lake of Gold, serialized in The Argosy from December 1902 to July 1903, in which a group of Britons and Americans use the riches from a lake of gold in Patagonia to enforce peace across Europe.[121][122][note 5]

The Argosy's sister magazine, All-Story Weekly, was the venue for most of the science fiction in the Munsey magazines, but Argosy did print Murray Leinster's first science fiction story, "The Runaway Skyscraper", in 1919.[12][note 6] Leinster's first sale, "The Atmosphere", had appeared in The Argosy the previous year.[126] Edgar Rice Burroughs's Barsoom series had begun in All-Story Weekly, as had his Tarzan novels; when the two magazines merged in 1920 later episodes of each series appeared in the combined magazine, Argosy All-Story Weekly.[127] Abraham Merritt's The Metal Monster began serialization in the August 7 issue, the third one after the merger,[12][128] and many more science fiction and fantasy stories followed in the next two decades by authors such as Ray Cummings, Ralph Milne Farley, Otis Adelbert Kline, Victor Rousseau, Eando Binder, Donald Wandrei, Manly Wade Wellman, Jack Williamson, Arthur Leo Zagat, and Henry Kuttner.[12][31] Merritt's "The Ship of Ishtar", which was serialized in 1924, was voted Argosy's most popular story in a reader poll in 1938.[31][129] In 1940 and 1941 Frederick C. Painton published a series of stories in Argosy about Joel Quaite, a time detective who travels into the past to solve mysteries.[130]

Erle Stanley Gardner, later famous for his Perry Mason detective stories, sold "Rain Magic", his first science fiction short story, to Argosy in 1928, and went on to write several more. Gardner combined science fiction with detective plots in some of these stories, and he was not the only writer to do so: Garrett Smith's "You've Killed Privacy!" in the July 7, 1928 Argosy was about using CCTV to catch criminals, and Leinster's "Darkness on Fifth Avenue", in the November 30, 1929 Argosy, about a device that can bring artificial darkness to an area, was originally intended for the detective pulps.[131]

Cover of the November 10, 1917 issue

Argosy's Western fiction included Zane Grey's Last of the Duanes, which appeared in the September 1914 Argosy,[132] and Walt Coburn's first story, "The Peace Treaty of the Seven Up", in the July 8, 1922 issue.[133][134] Max Brand, a very prolific Western writer, sold his first pulp stories to All-Story in 1917, but by the end of the year had begun selling to Argosy too.[135][136] Clarence Mulford was the creator of the character Hopalong Cassidy; the first few stories in the series appeared in other magazines, but many were published in Argosy in the early 1920s.[137][116] Robert E. Howard, best known for his stories about Conan the Barbarian, also wrote Westerns, several of which were published in Argosy in the mid-1930s.[138]

O. Henry appeared in the March 1904 Argosy with "Witches Loaves".[139] H. Bedford-Jones, a popular author with over 1,000 stories published in the pulps over his career, sold his first story, "Out of a Stormy Sky", to The Argosy in 1910, and appeared in its pages regularly for the next four decades.[116][140] Bedford-Jones's series about adventurer John Solomon began with The Gate of Farewell, serialized in the January and February 1914 issues, and continued in The Argosy and elsewhere for over twenty years.[116][141] George Worts published the first of his "Peter the Brazen" series, about an "expert wireless operator and dauntless adventurer", in Argosy in the October 5, 1918 issue; it became one of the most popular series in the magazine, with all twenty stories appearing in Argosy into the mid-1930s.[142][143] Under his own name and a pseudonym, Loring Brent, Worts contributed scores of other stories to Argosy over the same period.[143][144] Johnston McCulley had launched his Zorro series in All-Story in 1919 and more episodes appeared in Argosy after the two magazines merged.[145]

Fred MacIsaac, one of Argosy's most popular authors, first appeared in the November 1, 1924 issue with the first instalment of his novel Nothing but Money. Most of MacIsaac's work was not science fiction; an exception was The Hothouse World, a serial that ran in Argosy from February 21 to March 28, 1931.[146][147] Theodore Roscoe was a frequent contributor of adventure stories set in exotic locations such as Timbuktu and Saigon. He traveled the world once his writing began to pay him well enough to allow him to do so, and used the experience to add color to his stories.[148] Borden Chase sold his first story, "Tunnel Men", to Argosy in 1934 while he was a laborer on the tunnel being built under the East River in New York. He became a regular contributor, and his "East River", which appeared in Argosy in December 1934, was filmed the following year as Under Pressure.[149] Ship of the Line, an early novel in C. S. Forester's stories about Horatio Hornblower, was serialized in Argosy in early 1938.[150][151] Max Brand, though best known for his Westerns, wrote in many other genres as well, including historical fiction and mystery stories. He was the creator of Dr. Kildare, and four novels in the series appeared in Argosy between 1938 and 1940.[151][152] Mystery contributors included Cornell Woolrich, beginning with "Hot Water" in the December 28, 1935 issue,[153][154] and Norbert Davis.[155]

In 1903 Street & Smith launched The Popular Magazine, an early pulp rival to The Argosy with color art on the cover. Up to this point The Argosy had had text only on the cover, and no art, but in 1905, probably in response to The Popular Magazine, it began to run limited color art on the cover, and in 1912 it began to use full-color cover art.[156] At the start of the 1920s the most frequent cover artists for Argosy were Modest Stein, Stockton Mulford, and P. J Monahan; by the end of the decade Paul Stahr and Robert Graef had taken over most of the covers, and remained the main cover artists until the mid-1930s. Hulse considers the artwork of this era to have been "consistently good".[146] Towards the end of the 1930s Rudolph Belarski, Emmett Watson, and George Rozen become regular cover artists.[151]

Virgil Finlay was a popular illustrator for the Munsey magazines at the end of the 1930s and start of the 1940s. When Argosy planned to reprint Seven Footprints to Satan, one of A. Merritt's novels, in 1939, Merritt persuaded the editor, G. W. Post, to use Finlay as the interior illustrator.[157][158]

John Clute, discussing the American pulp magazines in the first two decades of the twentieth century, has described The Argosy and its companion The All-Story as "the most important pulps of their era."[159] In the era before the Second World War, Argosy was regarded as one of the "Big Four" pulp magazines, along with Blue Book, Adventure and Short Stories.[160][161] In the early 1960s Theodore Peterson, a magazine historian, considered the slick incarnation of Argosy, along with True, to be "the best magazines of their kind".[65] Peterson suggests that it was the success of these two magazines that led to the expansion of the men's magazine market during the 1950s.[65]

Henry Steeger, the founder of Popular Publications, and Jerry Mason, from 1949 to 1953 the editor of Argosy

In 1942, in an attempt to revive the magazine's fortunes, the all-fiction format was abandoned and articles about the war and "sensationalized" news stories were added.[30][162] The cover was redesigned starting with the March 7, 1942, issue, with the outline of a jet plane replacing the galleon behind the title, and a picture of the film star Dorothy Lamour on the cover instead of the usual adventure-themed cover art.[162] The title was changed to The New Argosy, though this change was reversed with the August issue.[12][62] The publication frequency was changed to monthly starting in May.[62]

The new version of Argosy was almost immediately caught in a crackdown by Frank Walker, the Postmaster General. The Post Office declared that publishers should consider "decency and good morals" in deciding what could be included in a mailed magazine, and promptly notified dozens of publishers that they had to attend a hearing in Washington or lose their permits. Argosy's citation from the Post Office listed stories considered to be obscene; the list included The G-String Murders, a serial by Rose Louise Hovick that began in May 1942, and "How Paris Apaches Terrorize Nazis in Girl Orgies" and "Sex Outrages by Jap Soldiers", articles in the July and August 1942 issues.[163][164][165] The hearings were thought by most publishers to be pointless, and nobody from Munsey attended. Argosy briefly lost its permit as a result,[163][note 7] but did not miss any issues.[62]

When Popular Publications acquired Argosy at the end of 1942, they announced that it would immediately return to a fiction-only format.[166] Richard Abbott, the editor of Writer's Digest, commented that Popular were "again making Argosy the fine old book it was", and that when they acquired Argosy it had "recently been degraded by wretched editing".[167] In September 1943, the format changed from pulp to slick, but Popular still planned to print only fiction. Rogers Terrill, the editor, announced that "we have stepped out of the pulp field entirely ... We felt there was room in the country for an all-fiction slick, and we're it."[69][168]

By the end of 1943, the policy had changed back to include feature articles again as well as fiction.[169][170] This made Argosy a competitor with slick general men's magazines such as True.[69] The publisher, Harry Steeger, later explained the reason for the change of focus, arguing that women had been the primary target for advertisers before World War II, but afterwards "new buying pursuits were adopted by the male and it began to be recognized by the advertising agencies that the male was an individual to be reckoned with in the purchase of all types of products ...".[69] The non-fiction material was mostly written in-house; in 1950 Argosy rejected over 99% of the unsolicited non-fiction manuscripts it received.[171]

After Argosy was acquired by Popular Publications, less science fiction appeared for a couple of years. Exceptions included some of Walter R. Brooks' Mr. Ed stories. The late 1940s saw more science fiction again, with stories by Nelson Bond, A. Bertram Chandler, and Robert A. Heinlein, whose "Gentlemen, Be Seated!" appeared in the May 1948 issue, and in the 1950s Argosy published work by Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, and Philip José Farmer. In 1977 one of Argosy's special issues was devoted to science fiction; the stories in it were all reprinted from Popular's Super Science Stories, rather than from earlier issues of Argosy.[12]

In September 1948 Erle Stanley Gardner began a true-crime column in Argosy called "The Court of Last Resort".[172] Gardner enlisted assistance from professional experts to examine the cases of dozens of convicts who maintained their innocence after their appeals were exhausted. The column ran for ten years, ending in October 1958, and was adapted for television as a 26-episode series by NBC. Many of the convictions were eventually overturned[172][70]

Argosy's title changed many times, either in an attempt to attract more readers, or because of mergers with other magazines.[44][46][62][68]

The long history of Argosy meant that by the 1930s there were many stories that readers had heard of but could no longer obtain. In response to reader requests, Munsey launched Famous Fantastic Mysteries in 1939 in order to reprint old stories from both Argosy and All-Story Weekly. The following year Munsey launched Fantastic Novels, another reprint magazine, in order to make longer stories available without needed to serialize them in Famous Fantastic Mysteries. Fantastic Novels only lasted five issues before being discontinued in 1941, but Famous Fantastic Mysteries lasted for 81 issues, ceasing publication with the June 1953 issue.[174][175] Popular brought back Fantastic Novels for another 20 issues between 1948 and 1951, and also produced five issues of A. Merritt's Fantasy Magazine, also as a reprint venue for stories from the old Munsey magazines, between 1949 and 1950.[175][176]

In 1976 Popular published two anthology magazines of stories, mostly science fiction and fantasy, titled The Best of Argosy Annual, though only some of the stories included had originally appeared in Argosy.[46] A collection of science fiction stories from the early years of The Argosy was edited by Gene Christie and published in 2010, titled The Space Annihilator and Other Early Science Fiction From the Argosy.[12]

There was a Canadian reprint edition; the first and last known issues were dated April 21, 1924, and July 1960.[46]