I really like this cover by Karl Godwin. It fairly shouts "Adventure!" at a potential reader. TOP-NOTCH is a pulp you don't hear much about anymore, but it had some good stories, most notably several by Robert E. Howard and the Ozar the Aztec series by Walker A. Tompkins writing as Valentine Wood. This issue has an Ozar story in it, as well as a novella by the always dependable J. Allan Dunn, a Western by Lee Bond writing as Tex Bradley, and several stories by authors I'm not familiar with: F.N. Litten, James Edward Hungerford, Paul H. Salomon, Erik W. Modean, and Alan Grey Mayne. They must have been decent writers to sell to Street & Smith.
8 comments:
I agree that it is a great magazine, I have 15 issues but alas not this one
There's a lot of gold in those TOP-NOTCH issues from the 1930's that has never been mined...
And people were saying 50 years ago that everything worth reprinting from the pulps had been reprinted already. To quote the Duke, not hardly.
I'm always fascinated with the pseudonym game that is played with pulps/westerns. While it's intriguing to know the realities behind the names, how the heck did you determine this info?
Great cover, I agree!
Are electronic copies of TOP NOTCH available?
Some of the pseudonyms I learn from the Fictionmags Index, where I get most of the scans. Others I've picked up from decades of reading fanzine articles and introductions to pulp collections, and some come from my own familiarity with certain authors' styles.
Looks like there are several issues available at the Internet Archive.
And there are 29 issues avaiable at Luminst Archive dating from 1910 to 1934.
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