The Death Of The Shudder Pulps
An embarrassingly long time ago, my patient friend Dr. Iago Faustus at Erotic Mad Science gave me a research commission to look into the death of the so-called “shudder” or “weird menace” pulps that flourished so luridly in the late 1930s and were extinct for all practical purposes by World War II. In particular, he asked me to look for hard evidence of the often-repeated common wisdom that they were killed off by censorship pressure.
I spent far too much time on research — and a bunch more on procrastination — with the end result that the written product of my efforts reads a lot more like hastily-typed-up notes than like a polished … anything. And I’m forced to admit that I’m far from completely satisfied with my own findings. Working as I do from rural Red State Heck, my access to primary sources was scattershot, having more to do with random vagueries of what happens to have been scanned and made searchable than with what I truly needed to access. So, in the end, I assembled a series of telling anecdotes, a constellation of data points, a handful of supporting primary sources, some firm opinions, and some hand-waving. But at least I can say that it’s more than anybody else has ever compiled on this particular question! It was fascinating to delve into the question in such detail, and I am debt to Dr. Faustus for his generosity in making the work possible.
The work has been appearing as a series of posts at Erotic Mad Science, but Dr. Faustus has now also compiled those posts onto a unitary What Killed The Shudder Pulps page for easy reference and reading convenience. Enjoy!
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Shorter URL for sharing: https://www.erosblog.com/?p=19588
And those notes, rudimentary though you might consider them, have made for a quite a good set of posts!
Thank you, Falbert!
I suspect that the further we get into our digital future the more all scholarship will be deformed by the “random vagueries of what happens to have been scanned and made searchable”
DeeAre, I agree with you! Although presently, my friends who are actual scholars and academics still look down on any research that is not conducted in an actual academic library with access to analog books and manuscripts.
I’m curious – do you disagree because you think eventually *everything* will be digitized, or because “actual scholars and academics” will stick to insisting on print citations, or something else I don’t understand?
I’d argue it’s roughly the same limitation we have from say 1,000 years ago where the “random vagueries of what happens to have” been copied enough to survive those eons certainly impacts our understanding of those times in ways we can’t possibly know. Eventually I have to think most things that don’t get digitized and searchable are going to be lost.
Sorry, I just realized I read “I agree with you” as “I disagree with you.” Clearly been hanging out on the Internet too much.
LOL, no worries. You and I are much of a mind. Certainly I think that digitizing paper things contributes enormously to their likelihood of surviving into the deep future; it’s a big part of my passion for curating old analog porn. Yes I’m not unaware of all the perils of unmaintained data formats and the like, I just think that data is so easy to copy and hoard that digital packrats and indiscriminate archivists save more of us for the future than monks and librarians ever managed to do with paper.
I think it’s a compelling argument to just scan everything you can and hope future AIs can bulk categorize it based on other sources. Certainly doesn’t hurt anything to try.