The editor who gave 'Pulp fiction' its name

The spring of 1994 saw the film Pulp fiction arrive at the Cannes Film Festival, which months later would be the first major success of a director from Tennessee named Quentin Tarantino. If a couple of years earlier he had already attracted attention with Reservoir dogs, with this second film he would achieve total consecration and transform into a money-making machine (the box office for this production exceeded 200 million dollars). More or less everyone has seen or, at least, has heard of Pulp Fiction, but not everyone knows what concept such a singular title refers to.

It all began with the initiative of Frank Munsey, an entrepreneur obsessed with communication. After working from a very young age as a telegrapher, he set his mind on publishing a magazine. Thanks to his perseverance and the financial support of some affluent friends, he was able to make his dream a reality. Arriving in New York with only forty dollars in his pocket did not foreshadow any success, but his drive allowed him to launch a first editorial project in 1882. It was a children's magazine called Golden Argosy which had the support of a New York publisher. Unfortunately, a few months later the publisher went bankrupt and the future of the publication seemed very compromised, but Munsey decided to keep the productive unit of the business and give it a new impetus. Six years later, he decided to modify the name and content, so it became a magazine for adults and would bear his own surname as its title. This renovation allowed him to abandon the precarious economy that had accompanied him until then and he also began to gain fame as a publisher.With renewed energy from good sales results, 1896 marked the beginning of a new era destined to forever change the publishing world: it began to massively publish a magazine made with the cheapest paper on the market, wood pulp paper, a product without any refinement and of rapid wear. This cost reduction allowed it to lower prices and position the working class with less purchasing power as the target audience for its fiction stories. The new readers did not have access to much entertainment when they left the factories, so they unanimously dedicated themselves to reading, an activity that until then had been forbidden to them due to the high cost of conventional magazines. Before the end of the century, Munsey’s Magazine was selling around 700,000 copies a month. One of the characters born in the pages of Munsey's magazines was Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan, who first appeared in 1912 in the magazine All-Story. However, you can't have everything; the very cheap pulps had earned a reputation for being very low-quality literature. That said, they had arrived to stay, and they did for a long time, to the point that Munsey himself would not live to see their decline.Seeing that the product had so much demand, he decided to diversify titles, and created thematic magazines with stories about the sea, about the world of railways, about mechanics, and many others. The large influx of resources that such high sales provided him was used to take another step and begin buying newspapers. With the arrival of the new century, he owned titles such as the Washington Times, the New York Daily News, the Boston Journal, the New Herald, or the New York Globe, among many others.Jump to politics

With his fortune consolidated, he created other businesses, such as the grocery store chain called The Mohican Stores, the financial company Munsey Trust Company, the Mohican hotel, and various companies to manage his vast real estate holdings. He also entered politics, because when former President Theodore Roosevelt was excluded from the electoral race by the Republicans (1912), Munsey financed the creation of a third party with Roosevelt at its head. The new Progressive Party finished ahead of the Republicans in that election.A few days before Christmas in 1925, the press magnate