{"id":7932,"date":"2017-03-23T11:43:48","date_gmt":"2017-03-23T15:43:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/?p=7932"},"modified":"2017-03-23T11:43:48","modified_gmt":"2017-03-23T15:43:48","slug":"a-postcard-for-every-occasion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/2017\/03\/23\/a-postcard-for-every-occasion\/","title":{"rendered":"A Postcard for every Occasion"},"content":{"rendered":"

This post is part of an ongoing series featuring recently cataloged items from the Ludlow-Santo Domingo Library<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\"img0017\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Pulps are so called because of the low quality of paper, coarse untreated paper produced from wood pulp, on which they were printed. Because the quality of paper was so poor\u00a0it meant\u00a0that it was cheap thus keeping production costs low and the subsequent cost for the reader\u00a0low as well. \u00a0Also because it was already so cheap they didn’t need advertisers within the early magazines. \u00a0Pulp magazines typically published escapist fiction for the popular entertainment of a mass audience and it was an incredibly successful model. \u00a0By 1915 it is estimated that a combination of eight of these magazines had a readership of 15% of the U.S. population. \u00a0These pulp novels featured cover art that revels in exploitation fantasies and lurid depictions of women, teenagers, sex, and drugs. \u00a0Teen-rebel dope fiends<\/em> is book of postcards featuring some of the most daring covers which were immediately familiar to me because we have the original pulps in the collection.<\/p>\n

\"img0018\"<\/a>\u00a0For instance we have this paperback edition of Claude Farrere’s Black Opium<\/em><\/a>, originally Fum\u00e9e d’opium,\u00a0<\/em>translated from the French by Samuel Putnam\u00a0at\u00a0Houghton. \u00a0You can see that the cover blurb\u00a0appears to feign disgust about the use of opium calling it “…shocking ecstasy of the forbidden”, but the illustration of the woman coming out of the opium pipe is clearly celebrating a sensationalist attitude designed to titillate the readers. \u00a0<\/span>\"img0020\"<\/a>I also\u00a0noticed the postcard cover of\u00a0Junkie<\/em><\/a> by William Lee, a pseudonym for\u00a0William S. Burroughs. \u00a0This was the first published novel by\u00a0Burroughs, it was semi-autobiographical and dealt with his experiences with heroin. \u00a0It was bound back-to-back with Narcotic Agent<\/em>\u00a0an abridgement of the memoirs of FBI agent Maurice Helbrant in an attempt to balance out unapologetic stories of drug use. \u00a0So two books for the low price of 35 cents. \u00a0The publisher A. A. Wyn also insisted that Burroughs add a preface explaining how someone like Burroughs, a Harvard graduate from a prominent family, was a drug addict. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The illustration on the cover of Junkie is again typical of these pulps. \u00a0We see an attractive blond woman in a scarlet skirt being forced to release her desperate grip on a syringe with other drug implements strewn across a table. \u00a0Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict\u00a0<\/strong>practically screams at the reader about the depravity of drugs and the unsavory consequences that can be found within its pages. \u00a0Junkie<\/em> is particularly interesting because of its cover art evolution as Burroughs became a respected writer. \u00a0It transforms from a “cheap shocker” to a respected cult novel by the 50th Anniversary publication.<\/p>\n

\"junkie_william_s-_burroughs_novel_-_2003_cover\"<\/a>Pulps have often been deemed unworthy of study because they epitomize mainstream culture of the 20th-century and until recently not many have been interested in this area of research, particularly academia. \u00a0I would argue that the look at popular culture is\u00a0exactly what makes pulps so fascinating to us today and more and more researchers are interested in studying them. \u00a0However pulps can be challenging to collect because they are so ephemeral and people just read them and never thought about saving them. \u00a0Also there are preservation challenges because of the cheap paper so they are brittle making handling of them difficult. \u00a0Luckily for us some collectors saw the value in keeping these types of novels and in the Ludlow-Santo Domingo collection there are an abundance of these pulp novels, many of whose covers are featured in this delightful volume of postcards.<\/p>\n

To get a glimpse of more pulp covers you can find\u00a0Teen-rebel dope fiends : pulp postcards<\/a>.\u00a0London : Prion, 2000 in Widener’s collection.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Thanks to Alison Harris, Santo Domingo Project Manager, for contributing this post.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This post is part of an ongoing series featuring recently cataloged items from the Ludlow-Santo Domingo Library.\u00a0 Pulps are so called because of the low quality of paper, coarse untreated paper produced from wood pulp, on which they were printed. Because the quality of paper was so poor\u00a0it meant\u00a0that it was cheap thus keeping production […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4490,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[72741],"tags":[111105,174578,2514,3897,174579,82558,174573,174574,174571,31167],"class_list":["post-7932","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-widener-library","tag-addicts","tag-black-opium","tag-burroughs","tag-drugs","tag-farrere","tag-heroin","tag-junkie","tag-junky","tag-ludlow-santo-domingo-collection","tag-postcards"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5TUly-23W","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7932","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4490"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7932"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7932\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7954,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7932\/revisions\/7954"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7932"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7932"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7932"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}