Kickstarter

Due their tattered and decaying condition Pulp Magazines are disappearing fast.

RadioArchives.com is looking to preserve our pulp fiction heritage by converting these fragile and crumbling magazines into an eBook format.

Pulp Literature started around 1896 with the publication of Argosy. From the get-go these powerful and entertaining magazines were a hit with readers everywhere.

As popular as they were, they were still made of the cheapest and most inexpensive paper product possible. By the time these aptly named  “pulps” came to the end of their run in the fifties, over 40,000 issues had hit newsstands and over 3 billion words were published.  

Due to the low grade paper used, many of them disappeared quickly. In some cases pulps disappeared during paper drives organized to help during World War II. This is just one reason that led to the disappearance of  hundreds of thousands of issues.

Paper allocations made during the war forced the cancellation of many best selling titles. In many cases publishers canceled most of their titles and funneled what paper they could get into their very best sellers. Still paper drives and low quality of the books have caused even those to disappear as well.

Pulps transcended age and gender. At their height they sold in the millions. There were pulps aimed at kids, pulps written for a hard working factory worker, pulps written for the man sitting on a horse to read by campfire light at the end of the day in Idaho and pulps that held stories a housewife could enjoy. 

They were the literature of America providing escape during the darkest days of the Depression and distraction form the War. The stories between those flimsy covers provided entertainment to millions.

As an entertainment medium pulps  held their own against the new technology of radio and even TV. It was only with the introduction of low cost paperback books in the fifties that they started to fade.

One of the most amazing aspects of pulps is how many of them were passed on to another reader. A pulp cost a dime and in the best cases would sell a quarter of a million an issue.

When most readers were done with a pulp they often passed an issue off to someone else to enjoy. Conservative estimates say that every pulps sold led to at least 3 other people reading it. A more realistic estimate of this "pass-around factor" are is high as 6 readers for every issue.

Pulps exposed millions of readers to new ideas and new concepts. They made literature and portable reading material available to the masses. Pulps also led to the creation of comic books. The Avengers Movie would look a lot different if The Shadow, Spider, Operator 5 or Doc Savage hadn’t been there first.

We are looking to preserve some of the most fun and heroic and definitely esoteric pulps form their heyday of the thirties and forties. However, the condition of the paper and the issues that are still around are tough to deal with.

Radio Archives intends to take fully licensed properties that originally appeared in the pulp format and, using the latest in preservation technology, convert these deteriorating printed books and magazines into eBooks.

Part of that technology will be the use of the latest in Optical Character Recognition software as we scan each pulp for conversion into the eBook format. This will allow readers, fans and those who are discovering pulp literature for the first time to enjoy these classic stories on their iPad, Kindle and  Nook.

In addition to immediate accessibility for the fan of today, the work Radio Archives is looking to do will ensure that these amazing stories are available to be discovered again and again by generations to come.

As a thank you for your help with this project, we are offering copies of future eBook releases that we will be scanning as part of the project. The backer levels to the right offer savings over the release price of $2.99. The $100 level poster of the Spider by Raphael DeSoto measures 12" by 18".

Radio Archives has always produced the highest quality product possible. The quality of the audio on our CDs is considered by fans to be the best available in the medium. The pulp reprints made for Radio Archives holds the clearest and most professional print quality to be found.

We will bring these high standards to play every time we convert a pulp into the new electronic medium.