Blue Book (magazine)
Encyclopedia
Blue Book was a popular 20th-century American magazine with a lengthy 70-year run under various titles from 1905 to 1975.
Launched as The Monthly Story Magazine, it was published under that title from May 1905 to August 1906 with a change to The Monthly Story Blue Book Magazine for issues from September 1906 to April 1907.
For the next 45 years (May 1907 to January 1952), it was known as The Blue Book Magazine or Blue Book Magazine. In the late 1930s, it was titled Blue Book of Fiction and Adventure. The title was shortened February 1952 to simply Bluebook, continuing until May 1956. With a more exploitative angle, the magazine was revived October 1960 as Bluebook for Men, and the title again became Bluebook for the final run from 1967 to 1975.
In its 1920s heyday, Blue Book was regarded as one of the "Big Four" pulp magazines, (the best-selling, highest-paying and most critically acclaimed pulps), along with Adventure
Adventure (magazine)
Adventure magazine was first published in November 1910 as a monthly pulp magazine. Adventure went on become one of the most profitable and critically acclaimed of all the American pulp magazines...
, Argosy
Argosy (magazine)
Argosy was an American pulp magazine, published by Frank Munsey. It is generally considered to be the first American pulp magazine. The magazine began as a general information periodical entitled The Golden Argosy, targeted at the boys adventure market.-Launch of Argosy:In late September 1882,...
and Short Stories
Short Stories (magazine)
-Origin of Short Stories:Short Stories began its existence as a literary periodical, carrying work by Rudyard Kipling,Emile Zola, Bret Harte, Ivan Turgenev and Anna Katharine Green. The magazine advertised...
.
Publishers and editors
The early publishers were Story-Press Corporation and Consolidated Magazines, followed in 1929 by McCallMcCall Corporation
McCall Corporation was an American publishing company that produced some popular magazines. These included Redbook for women, Bluebook for men, McCall's, the Saturday Review, and Popular Mechanics...
. After H.S. Publications took over the reins in October 1960, Hanro (Sterling) was the publisher from August 1964 until March 1966 and then the QMG Magazine Corporation, beginning April 1967.
The succession of editors included Karl Edward Harriman, Donald Kennicott (1929 to January 1952),
Maxwell Hamilton (February 1952 through the mid-1950s) and Andre Fontaine in the mid-1950s, followed by Frederick A. Birmingham. Maxwell Hamilton returned for the 1960 revival, followed by B. R. Ampolsk in 1967.
Illustrators and writers
Cover artists during the 1930s included Dean CornwellDean Cornwell
Dean Cornwell was an American illustrator and muralist. His oil paintings were frequently featured in popular magazines and books as literary illustrations, advertisements, and posters promoting the war effort. Throughout the first half of the 20th century he was a dominant presence in American...
, Joseph C. Chenoweth, Henry J. Soulen and Herbert Morton Stoops, who continued as the cover artist during the 1940s.
George Allan England
George Allan England was an American writer and explorer, best known for his speculative and science fiction. He attended Harvard University and later in life unsuccessfully ran for Governor of Maine. England was a socialist and many of his works have socialist themes.-Life:England was born in...
and William Hope Hodgson
William Hope Hodgson
William Hope Hodgson was an English author. He produced a large body of work, consisting of essays, short fiction, and novels, spanning several overlapping genres including horror, fantastic fiction and science fiction. Early in his writing career he dedicated effort to poetry, although few of his...
, as well as the "Freelances in Diplomacy" (1910) series by Clarence New, a series of early spy stories
Spy fiction
Spy fiction, literature concerning the forms of espionage, was a sub-genre derived from the novel during the nineteenth century, which then evolved into a discrete genre before the First World War , when governments established modern intelligence agencies in the early twentieth century...
. Rider Haggard also published work in Blue Book.
In the 1920s, Blue Book's roster of authors included two of the world's most famous
writers of popular fiction; Edgar Rice Burroughs
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Edgar Rice Burroughs was an American author, best known for his creation of the jungle hero Tarzan and the heroic Mars adventurer John Carter, although he produced works in many genres.-Biography:...
and Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie
Dame Agatha Christie DBE was a British crime writer of novels, short stories, and plays. She also wrote romances under the name Mary Westmacott, but she is best remembered for her 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections , and her successful West End plays.According to...
.
In addition to Tarzan
Tarzan
Tarzan is a fictional character, an archetypal feral child raised in the African jungles by the Mangani "great apes"; he later experiences civilization only to largely reject it and return to the wild as a heroic adventurer...
, Burroughts published material about "Nyoka, the Jungle Girl" in Blue Book. Nyoka first appeared in "The Land of Hidden Men," a 1929 Blue Book short story by Burroughs. In 1932, Burroughs expanded the story into his novel, The Jungle Girl, which was adapted into a movie serial in 1941, followed by another serial, The Perils of Nyoka (1942). The second serial was edited into a 1966 TV movie. Fawcett published a Jungle Girl comic book in 1942. The characters of Sax Rohmer
Sax Rohmer
Arthur Henry Sarsfield Ward , better known as Sax Rohmer, was a prolific English novelist. He is best remembered for his series of novels featuring the master criminal Dr...
, James Oliver Curwood
James Oliver Curwood
James Oliver Curwood was an American novelist and conservationist. His writing studio, Curwood Castle, is now a museum in Owosso, Michigan.-Biography and career:Curwood was born in Owosso, the youngest of four children...
, and Zane Grey
Zane Grey
Zane Grey was an American author best known for his popular adventure novels and stories that presented an idealized image of the Old West. Riders of the Purple Sage was his bestselling book. In addition to the success of his printed works, they later had second lives and continuing influence...
appeared in Blue Book. Adventure fiction
Adventure novel
The adventure novel is a genre of novels that has adventure, an exciting undertaking involving risk and physical danger, as its main theme.-History:...
was a staple of Blue Book; in addition to Burroughs, P. C. Wren
P. C. Wren
Percival Christopher Wren was a British writer, mostly of adventure fiction. He is remembered best for Beau Geste, a much-filmed book of 1924, involving the French Foreign Legion in North Africa, and its main sequels, Beau Sabreur and Beau Ideal Percival Christopher Wren (1 November 187522...
, H. Bedford-Jones
H. Bedford-Jones
Henry James O'Brien Bedford-Jones was a Canadian historical, adventure fantasy, science fiction, crime and Western writer who became a naturalized United States citizen in 1908. After being encouraged to try writing by his friend, writer William Wallace Cook, Bedford-Jones began writing dime...
, Achmed Abdullah
Achmed Abdullah
Achmed Abdullah , a pseudonym of Alexander Nicholayevitch Romanoff, was a Russian-born writer. He is most noted for his pulp stories of crime, mystery and adventure. He wrote screenplays for some successful films. He was the author of the progressive Siamese drama Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness,...
, George F. Worts, Lemuel De Bra (who specialized in "Chinatown
Chinatown
A Chinatown is an ethnic enclave of overseas Chinese people, although it is often generalized to include various Southeast Asian people. Chinatowns exist throughout the world, including East Asia, Southeast Asia, the Americas, Australasia, and Europe. Binondo's Chinatown located in Manila,...
" thrillers) and William L. Chester (with his Burroughs-influenced "Hawk of the Wilderness", about a white boy adopted by Native Americans
Indigenous peoples of the Americas
The indigenous peoples of the Americas are the pre-Columbian inhabitants of North and South America, their descendants and other ethnic groups who are identified with those peoples. Indigenous peoples are known in Canada as Aboriginal peoples, and in the United States as Native Americans...
) all published in the magazine. Sea stories were also popular in Blue Book, and George Fielding Eliot
George Fielding Eliot
George Fielding Eliot was a Second Lieutenant in the Australian army in World War I. He became a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and later a Major in the Military Intelligence Reserve of the United States Army...
, Captain A.E. Dingle and
Albert Richard Wetjen were some of the publication's authors known for this sub-genre .
Writers during the 1940s included Nelson S. Bond
Nelson S. Bond
Nelson Slade Bond was an American author who wrote extensively for books, magazines, radio, television and the stage....
, Max Brand
Max Brand
Frederick Faust, aka Max Brand|thumb|rightFrederick Schiller Faust was an American author known primarily for his thoughtful and literary Westerns. Faust wrote mostly under pen names, but today is primarily known by only one, Max Brand...
, Gelett Burgess
Gelett Burgess
Frank Gelett Burgess was an artist, art critic, poet, author and humorist. An important figure in the San Francisco Bay Area literary renaissance of the 1890s, particularly through his iconoclastic little magazine, The Lark, he is best known as a writer of nonsense verse...
, Eustace Cockrell, Irvin S. Cobb
Irvin S. Cobb
Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb was an American author, humorist, and columnist who lived in New York and authored more than 60 books and 300 short stories.-Biography:...
, William Lindsay Gresham
William Lindsay Gresham
William Lindsay Gresham was an American novelist and non-fiction author particularly regarded among readers of noir. His best-known work is Nightmare Alley , which was adapted into a 1947 film starring Tyrone Power.- Biography :Gresham was born in Baltimore, Maryland...
, Robert A. Heinlein
Robert A. Heinlein
Robert Anson Heinlein was an American science fiction writer. Often called the "dean of science fiction writers", he was one of the most influential and controversial authors of the genre. He set a standard for science and engineering plausibility and helped to raise the genre's standards of...
, MacKinlay Kantor
MacKinlay Kantor
MacKinlay Kantor , born Benjamin McKinlay Kantor, was an American journalist, novelist and screenwriter. He wrote more than 30 novels, several based on the American Civil War, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1956 for his 1955 novel Andersonville, about the Confederate prisoner of war camp...
, Willy Ley
Willy Ley
Willy Ley was a German-American science writer and space advocate who helped popularize rocketry and spaceflight in both Germany and the United States. The crater Ley on the far side of the Moon is named in his honor.-Life:...
, Theodore Pratt
Theodore Pratt
Theodore Pratt was an American writer who is best known for his novels set in Florida. He was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1901 to Thomas A. and Emma Pratt. The family later moved to New Rochelle, New York, where Theodore attended high school...
. Ivan Sanderson, Luke Short
Luke Short (writer)
Luke Short was a popular Western writer.Born in Kewanee, Illinois Glidden attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for two and a half years and then transferred to the University of Missouri at Columbia to study journalism.Following graduation in 1930 he worked for a number of...
(pseudonym of Frederick D. Glidden, 1908–1975), Booth Tarkington
Booth Tarkington
Booth Tarkington was an American novelist and dramatist best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novels The Magnificent Ambersons and Alice Adams...
. Albert Payson Terhune
Albert Payson Terhune
Albert Payson Terhune was an American author, dog breeder, and journalist. The public knows him best for his novels relating the adventures of his beloved collies and as a breeder of collies at his Sunnybank Kennels, the lines of which still exist in today's Rough Collies.-Biography:Albert Payson...
, Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson
Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson
Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson was an American pulp magazine writer and entrepreneur who pioneered the American comic book, publishing the first such periodical consisting solely of original material rather than reprints of newspaper comic strips...
, Philip Wylie and Dornford Yates
Dornford Yates
Dornford Yates was the pseudonym of the British novelist, Cecil William Mercer , whose novels and short stories, some humorous , some thrillers , were best-sellers in the 21-year interwar period between the First and Second world wars.The pen name, Dornford Yates, first in print in 1910, resulted...
.
An anthology of stories from the magazine is Best Sea Stories from Bluebook.
Pulp historian Ed Hulse has stated that between the 1910s and the 1950s Blue Book :
"achieved and sustained a level of excellence reached by few other magazines".
Sources
- An Index to Blue Book Magazine, compiled by Mike AshleyMike Ashley (writer)Michael Ashley is a British bibliographer, author and editor of science fiction, mystery, and fantasy.He edits the long-running Mammoth Book series of short story anthologies, each arranged around a particular theme in mystery, fantasy, or science fiction...
, Victor A. Berch and Peter Ruber, was completed in 2004 but has yet to be published.