Stylogeny combining Pulp Magazine Cover × Victorian Letterpress

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Style combination · Pairs well

Pulp Magazine Cover × Victorian Letterpress

Slab and shaded display faces from jobbing printing give the masthead its loud, crowded voice.

From the research on Pulp Magazine Cover

Mix them and make something Pulp Magazine Cover Victorian Letterpress

RISERISEPulp Magazine Cover × Victorian Letterpress
A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Pulp Magazine Cover, their arrangement from Pulp Magazine Cover, the finish from Victorian Letterpress. Not a real work, and not an image of either style.

01

What each style brings

Each part of the design comes from the style with the stronger say in it, and each style gives at least two.

Pulp Magazine Cover Victorian Letterpress & Wood Type

Type from Victorian Letterpress
Colour from Victorian Letterpress
Form from Pulp Magazine Cover
Composition from Pulp Magazine Cover
Surface from Victorian Letterpress

02

The type

Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.

Display · Victorian Letterpress

Rise

Abril Fatface, standing in for Fat face romans (Thorne, Figgins)

Text · Pulp Magazine Cover

The painted colour covers of American pulp fiction magazines, printed on slicker cover stock around cheap wood-pulp interiors (period 1896 to 1957, the year the American News Company was liquidated, a date sometimes taken as the end of the pulp era). An original painting, reproduced by offset, shows one lurid scene of peril, a heroic figure, a threatened woman and a villain or monster, under a huge masthead, and the cover alone had to sell the issue on the newsstand.

Archivo; Pulp Magazine Cover used Hand-lettered shaded mastheads and Slab and Egyptian display faces

03

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Victorian Letterpress, with a counter-accent from Pulp Magazine Cover. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Pulp Magazine Cover Victorian Letterpress & Wood Type

  • #efe4c9 ground · 36%
  • #1b1a17 ink · 14%
  • #b3322b accent · 18%
  • #f2c230 accent · 14%
  • #d9b45a accent · 10%
  • #24477d accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #efe4c9;
  --ink: #1b1a17;
  --accent-1: #b3322b;
  --accent-2: #f2c230;
  --accent-3: #d9b45a;
  --accent-4: #24477d;
  --font-display: "Abril Fatface", serif;
  --font-text: "Archivo", sans-serif;
}

Use it with care

Pulp Magazine Cover: Pulp covers sold peril through sexualised and violent imagery: the 'damsel in distress' was often half-dressed or bound, and Margaret Brundage's Weird Tales covers (1933-38) showed nude or semi-nude women, with whipping scenes noted as controversial, until a new decency standard was imposed on newsstand pulps in 1938. Spicy Detective and the other 'spicy' pulps made this their selling point. Pulp fiction of the 1930s also carried many Yellow Peril villains loosely based on Fu Manchu, so cover villains often rest on racial caricature, and exoticising colonial stereotypes were common too. Do not copy these conventions as neutral decoration: if the style is used, keep the drama but drop the gendered violence and ethnic stereotypes, or treat them knowingly and critically.

04

The two styles

A snarling jaguar lunges toward a man brandishing a knife as a frightened woman clings to the stone ruins below him. A jungle valley and stepped temple fill the background beneath the enormous yellow title “TEMPLE PERIL” on red. 1896–1957 · North America Pulp Magazine Cover The painted colour covers of American pulp fiction magazines, printed on slicker cover stock around cheap wood-pulp interiors (period 1896 to 1957, the year the American News Company was liquidated, a date sometimes taken as the end of the pulp era). An original painting, reproduced by offset, shows one lurid scene of peril, a heroic figure, a threatened woman and a villain or monster, under a huge masthead, and the cover alone had to sell the issue on the newsstand. An ornate vintage-style poster reads “RIVER FAIR” in huge red and navy letters on distressed cream paper. A circular illustration of a paddle-wheel steamboat sits between the words, surrounded by floral scrollwork, patterned borders, and a rising sun. 1810–1900 · Western Europe, North America Victorian Letterpress & Wood Type The commercial jobbing print of the industrial century: posters, playbills, auction notices and ephemera built from a flood of new display types (fat faces, Egyptians, grotesques, Tuscans and condensed wood type). Lines are centred and each is set in a different face and size to fill the measure, framed in rules and stock borders and printed in black with one or two flat colours.

05

More combinations

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