Amazing Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories, Startling Stories…name your lurid moniker. These old pulps are wonderfully art directed considering they were designed to do one thing – sell. These covers helped to set the adolescent mind into motion like throwing gas on a fire.

The cover lines were wonderfully leading and many of these old pulps featured major writers before they were ‘discovered’. Writers like A.E. Van Vogt, Theodore Sturgeon, Isaac Asimov, E.E. “Doc” Smith, Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and even Edgar Allen Poe were mentioned on the covers in the hopes of boosting sales.

The horror and mystery categories had just as fantastically created covers. Who can forget Forrest Ackerman’s Famous Monsters? Or the many other titles like Creepy, Eerie, Vampirella (quasi comic porn in those days), and ‘newer’ scifi pulps like Heavy Metal, Cinefantastique, Fangoria, and Starlog (issue #7 was all about Star Wars in 1977…I think I still have that issue in a box somewhere…hello, ebay!).

Ah, those were the days…