Pulp Classics — John Gregory Betancourt

"The Thrill Book" is a legendary magazine, one of the holy grails of pulp collecting. Original copies sell for thousands of dollars -- if you can find them. Running for sixteen issues in 1919, it was a magazine of "strange, bizzare, occult, mysterious tales," but not quite a fantastic-fiction magazine, mixing various types of adventure stories with often outstanding fantasy, horror, and science fiction by Murray Leinster, Seabury Quinn, Francis Stevens, Perley Moore Sheehan, Tod Robbins, Edward Lucas White, Greye La Spina, and other giants of the pulp era. While sheer scarcity may have once added something to the lustre of "The Thrill Book," now that an issue is finally made available at an affordable price, the reader may appreciate that this truly was a pioneering -- and supremely entertaining -- publication.