The Power of Pulps: From the Newsstand to the Academy

In honor of JMU’s First Annual Pulp Studies Symposium, JMU Special Collections presents “The Power of Pulps: From the Newsstand to the Academy,” a display of select issues from its extensive collection of pulp magazines. In addition, the exhibit will feature additional popular culture material inspired or adapted from the pulps and a guide to the exhibit.

Pulp magazines, which get their names from the low-cost wood pulp paper they were printed on, put popular fiction into the hands of readers for a very low price from the late 1800s until the mid-1950s. They were originally considered to be “low-brow” forms of literature, but recently have seen a revival in scholarship as researchers explore both their form and their content. This exhibit is in support of the Pulp Studies Symposium, and provides those visiting scholars and the JMU community with an in-depth introduction to the pulp magazines.

The display, near the Special Collections Reading Room on the 2nd floor of Carrier Library, will be on display through the end of January. A smaller exhibit of pulps will be located on the first floor of Rose Library near the elevator through October. Both exhibits are free and open to the public. An accompanying online exhibit is available at http://sites.jmu.edu/psx.