The Apotheosis of Pulp | 1,600 true crime magazines from the 1930s and beyond

As recently as the 1970s, true crime magazines were a significant, if not reputable, segment of the publishing industry. No liquor store magazine rack was complete without the lurid covers of True Detective warning of a “Sex Freak on the Prowl” or promising to reveal the scoop “Behind California’s Latest Mass Murder Case.” A fully stocked newsstand could feature perhaps as many as two dozen different titles every month. Yet this apparently healthy showing on the news racks was only masking the death throes of one of the great, uniquely American, genres of exploitation magazines. Within a decade, they had vanished from the national consciousness. When the grand dame of the genre, True Detective, finally suspended publication in 1996, most people thought it had died years before. It was a sad but hardly surprising end. This collection boasts over 1,600 magazines, including 212 different titles, primarily from the US, but also from Canada, England, and Sweden. No. 1s were a priority, and