When Athena Andoniades recently rummaged through a chest of her grandfather’s old magazines, she did not dismiss the bright eye-catching illustrations she found as old junk.

‘I had seen pulp magazines before. My grandparents used to read them when they were younger and kept all of them,’ said the sophomore television, radio and film major. ‘I was so intrigued because I wondered, ‘What was so great about these?’ These were the type of things people were obsessed with before TV and radio.’

The old magazines both she and her grandparents were fascinated by are a type of literary fiction magazine called pulp magazines. Better known as pulp fictions, these were widely read by all ages for decades until the 1950s and the 1960s. Syracuse University officials hope to reintroduce this once-popular genre by showcasing an exhibit called ‘Orange Pulp: The Pulp Magazine and Contemporary Culture.’

The exhibit displays original magazines, manuscripts and artwork from the university’s vast collection of pulp magazines and pulp paintings. The collection has been gathered for more than 40 years. The first acquisition occurred in 1967 with the gain of the Street and Smith archive and further expanded with the collection of writers such as A.A. Wyn and Forrest J. Ackerman. Gary Shaheen, the senior vice president at the university’s Burton Blatt Institute and co-curator of the display, has also contributed his sizeable collection of pulp magazines to the exhibit.

‘I had been, in my off time as a professor at SU, always interested in this kind of genre and had put together a pretty good collection,’ Shaheen said. ‘I found out that Syracuse is one of the largest hubs for that era of those magazines and that our university’s art gallery is the home to probably one of the nation’s biggest collection of pulp magazine paintings.’

Thus, the collaborative exhibit began. In addition to the library’s show, a partner exhibit displayed in the Shaffer Art Building opened to the public Jan. 25, and both are set to be on display until June 17. The two different locations feature diverse aspects of pulp magazines and the pulp culture.

Pulp magazines with more notable titles — such as ‘Weird Tales’ and ‘Amazing Stories,’ works by Hugo Gernsback, the man who coined the term ‘science fiction’ — will be featured in the Special Collections Research Center gallery on the sixth floor of E.S. Bird Library. Meanwhile, the SUArt Gallery at the Shaffer Art Building will feature a more focused perspective on the pulp magazines with a profile of pulp magazine artist Norman Saunders. The exhibit includes 10 of his paintings from SU’s collection.

Pulp magazines featured a wide range of genres, such as mystery, adventure, western, horror, romance and science fiction. These magazines, which were first created in the late 1890s, were named for the inexpensive wood pulp that publishers began using after 1850. Though the paper used was cheap, the rich, attention-grabbing cover illustrations — which resembled those of modern-day comic books — made up for it.

‘I’ve never read a pulp magazine before,’ said Greg Babcock, a sophomore photography major and a contributing photographer for The Daily Orange. ‘I think if I did, it would be the interesting art that would make it most appealing.’

However, the exhibit is not simply an art display. One of the main purposes for the magazine exhibits is to further examine the pulp culture of these magazines, Shaheen said. By recreating the pulp world of many publishers, writers and readers who supported and promoted this genre of publication — the likes of whom include Tennessee Williams, who published his first work in a pulp magazine — our generation will be able to see how this literary art form is reflected in the media today.

Though pulp magazines have died out in today’s mainstream media, many aspects of these publications have been reborn in new forms of media, such as comic books, magazines, radio, television and film.

‘The type of innovations that were put out as fiction were essentially studied and found their way into current news,’ Shaheen said. ‘Many of the things, like rocket jet packs or going to the moon or new vaccines, even television, had their start in pulp magazines.

‘There’s a really great crossover between what was developed in the popular literature of the day and current media and many aspects of our culture that we now take for granted.’

dmodiama@syr.edu

Published on February 13, 2011 at 12:00 pm

Contact Danielle: dmodiama@syr.edu | @daniemarieodie