Noted book and pulp collector Kevin Cook sends along some more food for thought, following up the musings he closed out the last year on.
Here’s Kevin:
The newspaper reprint phenomenon has more elements than we have touched on.
For instance, newspapers seem to have had a habit of picking reprints from certain pulps.
Edgar Rice Burroughs and Dashiell Hammett we already know about, but I can attest that other authors from the Munsey group were also reprinted in newspapers; among them H. Bedford-Jones (John Solomon), Ray Cummings and Homer Eon Flint.
I own a reprint of Flint’s “The Missing Mondays,” a Munsey serial, reprinted complete in the Sunday March 3, 1940 issue of the Akron Beacon Journal in their “The Sunday Novel” feature, 17 years after it’s serialization in Argosy All-Story Weekly — and well after Flint’s death.
Who would have been marketing Flint’s old stories at that point in time, if anyone?
Perhaps Munsey. But my thought has been that some parent newspaper company to the Akron paper bought the rights years back and was just recirculating the story.
Think of the number of Hammett reprints there could be if parent companies bought story rights and then reprinted them in all their different papers over a period of years? Hearst, for instance?
I mean, who would have thought to check the Akron Beacon Journal for pulp magazine reprints?
Does the newspaper even exist today? Are their files on microfilm somewhere?
Edgar Rice Burroughs’ “The Man Eater” was only located decades later by going through records of every issue of the New York Evening World that was reprinting tons of his stuff.
That’s why I think that it would be impossible to locate every Hammett reprint, when you know that pulp reprints were appearing in totally obscure newspapers.
