Saturday, July 19, 2014

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Western Story, October 5, 1940


Sort of an unusual cover by H.W. Scott on this issue of WESTERN STORY, commemorating the 500th anniversary of Coronado's exploration of the American Southwest. Inside, however, is the usual top-notch line-up of authors: Luke Short, Harry F. Olmsted, Bennett Foster, S. Omar Barker, Seth Ranger (Frank Richardson Pierce), George Cory Franklin, and Harry Sinclair Drago. Mighty good reading for your dime, I suspect.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow! Great cover and not at all what I'd expect to see on any western pulp. More the sort of thing you might see on BLUE BOOK, I think. Thanks for posting it, James.

Curt Phillips

Walker Martin said...

WESTERN STORY did have some excellent art, especially Nick Eggenhofer's interior illustrations. But in the 1920's the cover art mainly depicted scenes from the life of the cowboys and not the usual shoot-em-ups.

In fact in 1931 they actually had a series of covers painted by Gayle Hoskins titled "Scenes From a Life of a Cowboy". There were a couple dozen covers showing such scenes as branding, eating at the chuck wagon, fighting rustlers, etc. Street & Smith gathered together prints of these covers and gave them away to subscribers.

I managed to find a set after many years of searching. The sets are quite rare because almost everyone hung them on the walls and eventually disposed of them. Very few survived in the mailing packet which describes each scene.