At age eleven this reviewer used to sneak second-hand copies of Street & Smith’s Astounding Science-Fiction and Doc Savage magazines into his room; and once, somewhere along the line, he was caught—in true Sateve-post cover style—with a copy of The Shadow behind his geography book. He therefore read this genial history of America’s most enterprising pulp publisher with relish—and the sort of stubborn affection one feels for any outlandish aspect of one’s own past.
Even readers who have never felt the coarse texture of pulp paper under their eagerly licked thumbs, ought to have fun with it. It is, to be sure, just a big, anecdotal Happy Birthday present to Street & Smith on their first one hundred years of mail-order myth-making. The stories the film printed about Buffalo Bill, Nick Carter and Frank Merriwell were, again to be sure, trash. But the stories Mr. Reynolds tells about how and why they were conceived are not only fascinating, but make significant social history.
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