Fantastic Universe, 53 Vintage Pulp Magazine Golden Age Science Fiction DVD

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Before the epic movie Pulp Fiction, there was Pulp Magazines.  Pulp magazines (often referred to as "the pulps") were  inexpensive fiction magazines that were published from 1896 through the 1950s. The term pulp derives from the cheap wood pulp paper on which the magazines were printed; in contrast, magazines printed on higher quality paper were called "glossies" or "slicks". The typical pulp magazine had 128 pages; it was 7 inches (18 cm) wide by 10 inches (25 cm) high, and 0.5 inches (1.3 cm) thick, with ragged, untrimmed edges.

In their first decades, pulps were most often priced at ten cents per magazine, while competing slicks cost 25 cents a piece. Pulps were the successors to the penny dreadfuls, dime novels, and short fiction magazines of the 19th century. Although many respected writers wrote for pulps, the magazines were best known for their lurid and exploitative stories and sensational cover art. Modern superhero comic books are sometimes considered descendants of "hero pulps"; pulp magazines often featured illustrated novel-length stories of heroic characters.

Fantastic Universe was a U.S. science fiction magazine which began publishing in the 1950s. It ran for 69 issues, from June 1953 to March 1960, under two different publishers. It was part of the explosion of science fiction magazine publishing in the 1950s in the United States, and was moderately successful, outlasting almost all of its competitors. The main editors were Leo Margulies (1954–1956) and Hans Stefan Santesson (1956–1960); under Santesson's tenure the quality declined somewhat, and the magazine became known for printing much UFO-related material. A collection of stories from the magazine, edited by Santesson, appeared in 1960 from Prentice-Hall, titled The Fantastic Universe Omnibus.  Our collection includes 53 of those issues.  Each issue is about 130 pages.

Please note that this collection contains scans of old magazines, some of which were in poor condition before being rescued and digitized for posterity.  This means that you may see some covers with creases and tears that show up in the scans.

Issues List: