Munsey printed five hundred thousand copies of the first issue and claimed that they sold out. Some credence was given to his claim when the second issue appeared printed on an excellent grade of book paper, which even after sixty-four years shows little signs of aging. The June, 1906, issue of THE ARGOSY carried a house ad signed by Robert H. Davis offering cash for old scrapbooks: "Collections of poetry, humor, interesting statistical data, strange happenings, animal stories, curiosities in literature, biographical, etc., especially desired." Evidently the magazine intended to make up a substantial part of its contents from actual scrapbooks.
An apparently happy state of affairs and sales continued until the June, 1907, issue, when Frank A. Munsey was hit by one of the most bizarre publishing brainstorms of all time. "The new idea, in a word," he wrote, "is the publishing of a magazine in two sections—two complete magazines, each with its own cover, and yet each bearing the same name, and being a part of the whole. The two magazines are to be sold as one, precisely as in the case of the Sunday newspaper with its varying sections."
Munsey referred pointedly to the tremendous competition now building in the all-fiction pulp field that had been all his own for a while. He said that economic pressures were forcing costs of magazines upward and that the ten-cent price, which had created the mass audience, could not survive much longer.
The July, 1907, issue of THE SCRAP BOOK appeared in two sections. The first section was 180 pages on coated stock with at least as many illustrations and halftones as pages. The entire content was nonfiction and poetry, and there was a fascinating variety of features. The second section was all fiction, printed 192 pages on book paper, with a colored pictorial cover. The stories were both new and reprints.
The one problem was that the customer had to buy both sections for twenty-five cents, and a quarter of a dollar was a lot of money in 1907. While it had seemed to be a good idea to have a magazine that two people could read simultaneously, it also turned out that many readers were not interested in one or the other of the sections and wouldn't invest twenty-five cents just to get the section they wanted. The result was a circulation disaster; sales fell off in great gobs of forty thousand and fifty thousand an issue. The Great Experiment had failed! The cover of the September, 1908, nonfiction First Section stated: "Beginning with the October number, THE SCRAP BOOK will be printed in colors and issued in one part only—The price will be ten cents a copy."
In creating the two-part magazine, Munsey had editorialized that the day of the specialized magazine was fast arriving and that people were tired of purchasing an entire periodical just to get one or two things that interested them. He was quite evidently sincere in that appraisal, for on September 15, 1906, he distributed the October issue of THE RAILROAD MAN'S MAGAZINE, a 192-page ten-cent pulp, just as heavy on the fiction as on the fact, copiously illustrated, and aimed directly at a relatively narrow audience. Despite a quantity of factual material, the appearance of this magazine was a landmark event, for it was the first truly specialized pulp magazine, a forerunner of the detective, western, love-story, air, and science-fiction pulps to come.
That was followed by an even more remarkable experiment, THE OCEAN, whose first issue was dated March, 1907. It was a magazine of sea stories with some nonfiction, printed on pulp paper, 192 pages for ten cents. It would run eleven issues through to January, 1908, and seven of those issues would carry science fiction. The first issue led off with a four-part novel, Sea Gold, by George Bronson-Howard, a popular contributor to adventure magazines, with a story of a man who discovers how to make gold and the efforts of the "Trust Trust" to gain exclusivity of the secret. The August issue ran a short, The Passing of the Waters, by Edwin C. Dickinson, in which the United States Navy is sunk by a superior enemy fleet which then goes steaming through the Panama Canal. An engineer blows up a key dam, releasing the waters from the artificial lakes, leaving the enemy's ships stranded in the mud. The most interesting story it printed was the two-part serial In the Land of Tomorrow, by Epos Winthrop Sargent, of an island, some hundreds of miles off New Zealand, where those scientists are welcomed whose outstanding inventions have been refused by the world. Marriage is not permitted, for the children from the union of men and women scientists frequently prove physically defective. On Century Island there is weather control, electricity from radioactivity, electric cooking, and thermostatically controlled baths. While the plot is old, focusing about two lovers building an airplane to escape the island, the story is a superior piece of work for its period, particularly in its effective writing.
The audience of THE OCEAN proved too limited, so it was discontinued with the January, 1908, number and resumed as THE LIVE WIRE with the February issue. THE LIVE WIRE was a fabulous pulp. Like all the others, 192 pages for ten cents, it undoubtedly was the first pulp magazine and maybe the only one to run all illustrations, one hundred fifty or more of them in each issue, in two colors. Frank A. Munsey had bought some new two-color presses and was using THE LIVE WIRE as an experimental publication, and it was a joy to thumb through page after page of articles, stories, poems, and cartoons, all illustrated profusely, all well drawn, and all with a second color. The contents were very similar to those of the early issues of THE SCRAP BOOK.
The eight issues of THE LIVE WIRE contained a number of tales of science fiction. The Great Scourge of the World, by H. A. and G. A. Thompson (May, 1908), told of the attempts by a scientist to specifically destroy the poverty-stricken and miserable of the world with a direct-contact gas spray that produced the effects of the Black Plague, but whose effects were non-contagious. The Great Baseball Brainstorm of 2002 (June, 1908), by B. Bulger, is one of the earlier if not the earliest sports story of the far future. The Burning Image, by Crittendon Marriott, which began in the July, 1908, number, was a six-part novel which begins as a cloak-and-dagger murder mystery and ends in a confrontation with a fantastic Mayan god. Marriott was an important early mystery-story writer who occasionally dabbled in science fiction.
THE SCRAP BOOK had been a split personality, and its conversion back to a single monthly magazine was equally schizophrenic. The title of the fiction section was changed to THE CAVALIER, which began life with the October, 1908, issue. Five uncompleted serials from THE SCRAP BOOK were resumed by THE CAVALIER, which at first ran on book paper, 192 pages for ten cents. The boost in a carryover in readers who are hung up on five serials was its initial sales impetus.
The nonfiction section of THE SCRAP BOOK incorporated THE LIVE WIRE with its October, 1908, issue, carrying on that magazine's uncompleted serials. The tasteful covers were back, the fiction was back, and so were the scores of odds and ends that had previously been an integral part of the magazine. Additionally, all the illustrations in Tin; SCRAP BOOK now appeared in two and three colors, which showed up dramatically on the book-paper stock used.
THE SCRAP BOOK had used a limited amount of science fiction and supernatural tales previously, including reprints of Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, Washington Irving, E. Bulwer-Lytton, Daniel Defoe, and an excerpt of Frankenstein's Monster (February, 1907) from Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's famous novel. The most interesting of the new stories were The Human Brick, by Mark C. Francis (October, 1907), where the ashes of a cremated man are made into a brick and he retains consciousness after becoming part of an apartment house; When Science Warred, by Julian Johnson (November, 1907), in which an old French scientist permits plague germs to enter a gale heading toward Germany, to forestall an invasion by that nation; The Avatar, by Harvey J. O'Higgins, which finds a student with a head injury suffering lapses in which he writes manuscripts in Monk Latin; and The Thing Behind the Curtain, by Charles Stephens (May-July, 1908), relating the invention of a machine for transmitting and receiving thought waves with an intensity so effective it can temporarily activate cadavers.
The year 1909 saw THE SCRAP BOOK place greater emphasis on science fiction, with several important authors making novel-length contributions. Editor Sheehan had pa
id Garrett P. Serviss four hundred dollars for his sixty-five thousand word novel of an air-buccaneer operation in the year 1936 titled The Sky Pirate. Compared to The Columbus of Space, which was still running in THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE, The Sky Pirate (April-September, 1909) showed a paucity of imagination, with a girl kidnapped by air, and running battles between planes not capable of doing over one hundred forty miles per hour. The actual writing was smooth, and the story was easy to read, though it would never be reprinted.
Serviss' serial was followed by George Allan England's first long science-fiction tale, The House of Transformation (September-November, 1909), dealing with the use of extensive and advanced surgery to turn a gorilla into a man.
With the July, 1909, issue, THE SCRAP BOOK had dropped its family-type cover and gone back to straight title and the blazoning of the feature story, with at best a tiny line cut. During 1910, in size and advertising it gave the outward appearance of prosperity and success, but by 1911, it switched back to pulp paper and not only dropped interior illustrations in color but also dropped all art. Though the quality of the stories and articles remained good, there was less variety. Outstanding during this last year of its regular publication was Monsieur De Guise, (January, 1911), by the magazine's editor, Perley Poore Sheehan, a masterfully poignant ghost story of a great Southern mansion on an island in a cedar swamp, and an old man who sits in luxurious splendid isolation and recalls the spirit of his dead wife to sing for a guest a sweet love song in French. George Allan England's The Man with the Glass Heart (May, 1911) was a brilliant anticipation of today's surgical experiments, written with considerable skill.
7. THE ADVENT OF "THE CAVALIER"
THE CAVALIER started from Volume 1, Number 1 in its October, 1908, issue, even though it carried THE SCRAP BOOK'S serials. Editorship had been turned over to Robert H. Davis. The first few issues continued the fine book paper, but it was changed to pulp in 1909. The tastefully handsome covers, patterned after THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE and THE POPULAR MAGAZINE, were carried into 1910. The stories were unillustrated.
No time was lost in presenting science fiction, World Wreckers, by Frank Lillie Pollock, appearing in the November, 1908, issue. A short novel of a scientist who invents a method of manufacturing gold and is kidnapped by a group who work to use the metal to take over the world, it is easy to read. The preoccupation of writers of the turn of the century in dealing with the possibility of the conversion of baser metals to gold is so intensive that a fourth-year thesis by a sociology major on the theme might prove illuminating.
Following the lead of THE POPULAR MAGAZINE almost four years earlier, THE CAVALIER secured first American rights to a novel by H. Rider Haggard. THE CAVALIER badly needed a circulation winner. It was a good magazine, but by 1910 there were a lot of good magazines, and more being added.
THE POPULAR MAGAZINE had gone twice a month for a three-month experimental period with its October, 1909, issue. It was the same as adding another potent competitor. THE POPULAR MAGAZINE was edging close to four hundred thousand monthly circulation. It was the biggest pulp magazine on the stands, with 224 pages, and if the readers could be trained to buy two issues a month there were bound to be tens of thousands who had bought a second or third magazine who would drop it for the additional issue of THE POPULAR MAGAZINE. These implications boded no good for the supremacy of THE ARGOSY, which had reached a peak of over five hundred thousand copies monthly in 1907 and had begun to decline under the press of competition. The big selling point that THE ARGOSY had was its five to seven serials. THE POPULAR MAGAZINE as a semimonthly would negate that factor. It had long been publishing a complete 50,000-to-70,000-word novel every issue. Now its readers would have to wait only half the usual time between installments of its serials.
Since June, 1890, a monthly magazine, SHORT STORIES, had engaged a select clientele, translating stories from other languages and reprinting old classics. It had always published many new stories, but in recent years was greatly increasing the ratio. Doubleday purchased the magazine in 1910 and converted it into a 160-page pulp in direct competition to the other adventure magazines in the field. SHORT STORIES had never printed a great deal of science fiction, but it did run some. It reprinted The Purple Pileus, by H. G. Wells, in its issue of March, 1908, telling of a harried, henpecked man who eats a fungus which changes his entire character and life. October of the same year saw a new story, The Gyroscope, by Percival Landon, of a mammoth gyroscope that goes awry and creates havoc. Its editor, Harry Peyton Steger, was regarded by Bob Davis as one of the magazine field's finest. He died in 1912 and his seat was taken by Harry Maul, who converted the publication into a man's adventure magazine.
Against existing and new competition, THE CAVALIER was having great difficulty getting its circulation above seventy-five thousand. The question was, could H. Rider Haggard do for it what he had done for THE POPULAR MAGAZINE?
When purchasing Ayesha for publication in 1905, THE POPULAR MAGAZINE had implied that they had to outbid several other publications to get it. THE CAVALIER'S price for the ninety thousand-word Morning Star, which they ran as an eight-part serial (November, 1909-June, 1910), seems quite moderate. It was purchased from Haggard's London agent, A. P. Watt & Son, on September 15, 1909, for eight hundred dollars, or less than one cent per word. THE CAVALIER bought first American serial rights only, United Kingdom serial rights going to THE CHRISTIAN WORLD NEWS OF THE WEEK, who published it in twenty-one installments, October 21, 1909-March 10, 1910.
THE CAVALIER rushed the novel into print almost instantly, probably because the American hardcover edition from Longmans, Green & Co., New York, was scheduled for May 27, 1910. Undoubtedly, for this reason, there was no lead time for fanfare, no special covers or promotions. The novel was included as would be any other novel. During the period of its appearance it was the policy of THE CAVALIER not to run story titles on the cover.
Morning Star, as a favorite of Haggard fans, is an excellent story of action and intrigue set against the background of ancient Egypt. A princess of Egypt, raised by Asti, a woman with magical powers, does not want to marry the Pharaoh. The Egyptians believed that everyone had a spiritual double, which they called a Ka, which could take that person's form but was capable of living without a body. The Ka of the Egyptian princess marries the Pharaoh for her and does him in. In the process, the princess is rescued from the Nile by a ship rowed by ghosts, and they are aided by the wondrous harp of Kepher, god of the desert people. It sounds like an unlikely grab bag, but it is told well.
There was virtually no effect upon the magazine's circulation as a result of the Haggard novel. The story had not been "merchandised."
An unusual fact about a short science-fiction novel that appeared in the January, 1910, issue of THE CAVALIER has never been called to the attention of the reading public. That novel, The Wizard of the Peak, by Thomas E. Grant, of Estes Park, Colorado, was almost a paragraph-by-paragraph, character-by-character paraphrase of Garrett P. Serviss' The Moon Metal. The Wizard of the Peak is built around the situation of the world running out of coal and all industry collapsing as a result, to be temporarily saved by a mad scientist who can extract power from the air. He holds the world in his thrall until his secret is duplicated, then disappears, to be seen again and again in the vicinity of his power plants in different parts of the world. The last scene is a confrontation with the young scientist who upended him; the madman literally fades away into the air; there follows a great explosion of one of his plants, resulting in his image being permanently engraved on the side of the mountain.
Since THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE had reprinted The Moon Metal as recently as 1905, it is strange that it wasn't spotted by the editors, though it undoubtedly was later called to their attention by the readers. At that time there were no readers' departments, so no record of the reaction was made in print. It was the only story by Grant published by a Munsey magazine, and they paid him 175 dollars for it.
Throughout 1910 and most of 1911, THE
CAVALIER indulged itself in a series of "humorous" science fiction about impractical inventors whose ideas backfire. Edgar Franklin was present with his Hawkins stories, possibly the longest series ever to run in science fiction. They were popular at first, and then after scores of episodes, hooted and reviled by Munsey readers. Burke Jenkins wrote a series of his own for THE CAVALIER, about Mr. Wimple, who invents a "woundless rifle," a fog piercer, a wonder plant that grows instant mangoes, and a method for slowing down the frantic pace of "modern" 1910 life. There were numerous humorous "solos" by others, but with acute circulation trouble, the magazine needed something calculated to bring in more customers than these slapstick shorts were capable of attracting.
All of Munsey's magazines were experiencing serious declines in circulation. THE ARGOSY had dropped below four hundred thousand copies and would eventually fall to three hundred thousand. THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE, from a peak of three hundred thousand, was down to close to two hundred thousand and would drop another twenty-five thousand. THE CAVALIER had never seen one hundred thousand and through most of its life would never go much over seventy-five thousand. Even the big-time slick, MUNSEY'S MAGAZINE itself, from a height of seven hundred thousand was down close to four hundred thousand.
Under the Moons of Mars: A History and Anthology of the Scientific Romance in the Munsey Magazines, 1912-1920 Page 45