16-month hanging calendar of frame-ready vintage pulp Western magazine covers
The Wild West is just a wagon ride away each month with this collection of faithfully reproduced vintage pulp western fiction magazine covers from the 1930s – 1950s.
Spicy Western Stories; Cover Art: Allen Anderson; Culture Publications, June 1941.
The “spicy” pulps were very popular among audiences looking for more titillating forms of escapist fiction. Magazines from Culture Publications such as Spicy Mystery Stories and Spicy Western Stories were an evolution of the earlier “girlie” magazines like Snappy Stories, published by William Mann Clayton beginning in 1912. Clayton and other men’s magazine publishers faced pressure from civic groups to tone down their explicit content, with Clayton even being arrested in 1916 for supplying indecent material. The pulp industry’s solution to these demands was to dilute the explicit content by mixing it with other genres of pulp fiction such as horror, mystery, adventure, and westerns. Hence, the “spicy” pulps were born when publishers Harry Donenfeld and Frank Armer teamed up to form what became Culture Publications, specializing in genre fiction mixed with “girlie” content. Donenfeld is also famous for his ownership of National Periodical Publications, better known by its more recent name, DC Comics. In 1943, Culture Publications replaced the word “spicy” in their pulp titles with the less descriptive word “speed” in a bid to further stave off criticism, and possibly out of a fear of serving jail time. This name change had a rather chilling effect on sales, with only Speed Western continuing at newsstands through 1948. The cover of the June 1941 issue of Spicy Western Stories was contributed by the incomparable pulp artist Allen Anderson. The artwork depicts a saloon girl either being removed from the path between cowboy and adversary or preparing to be thrown into it. Anderson excelled at painting women in motion and, unlike many other pulp artists of the time, often presented the women on his covers as protagonists rather than damsels in distress. This is seen most often in his cover art for the science fiction pulps where women in armor and wielding swords hold their own alongside male heroes. Few of his original works survive today, but a resurging interest in vintage pulps has kept Anderson’s covers alive for a new generation of fans.
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