Halfway through the Research Marathon.
You'll have noticed that I stopped doing the pulp market share posts.
The reason for this is that I discovered that my master list of pulps I was using for the market share data was...embarrassingly...incomplete. I say "embarrassingly" because I took it almost entirely from my Pulp Magazine Holdings Directory, which I'd thought was exhaustive but clearly was not. I discovered that the works I'd used to compile the PMHD had been inconsistently compiled, with large numbers of saucy/spicy pulps incorrectly labeled. And I discovered that I had completely omitted the true crime pulps from the PMHD, which meant they weren't on the master list, which meant I was omitting them from the market share data posts.
So I've spent this week--and I mean all week--going through 6000+ magazine entries and redoing the master list, adding in the saucy/spicy pulps and true crime pulps I originally left off. While doing this I discovered an entirely new source of data, better in many respects than what I previously had, so once I finish this post I'm going to begin comparing the new master list with the new source of data, which is 5000+ entries.
So far I've added 240 pulps, almost all of which were saucy/spicy and true crime. Which means that there were more saucy/spicy and true crime pulps--and in all probability issues--than there were science fiction pulps, and sports pulps. I'm eager to resume the market share posts, because I want to see just how much of the market the true crime pulps occupied. A number of them lasted for decades. It is entirely possible that the true crime pulps will end up with enough of the market to put them on par with the major genres like Detective and Romance.
Does anyone talk about the true crime pulps being that important? I suppose the apposite comparison is Silver Age comics, where a substantial part of the market consisted of romance and western comics, neither of which get a fraction of the discussion that Silver Age superhero comics get.
I won't go so far as to say that the entire pulp industry and market needs to be reconsidered, but any serious discussion of the pulps can no longer omit the true crime pulps (and the saucy pulps, who might also surpass the science fiction pulps) as a major part of the industry. In fact, we might need to seriously consider if the better pulps, like Adventure and Argosy, were not tentpoles for everyone else, but were the beneficiaries of a rising economic tide brought about by the true crime and saucy pulps.
Lastly, the new data shortens the transition period between dime novels and pulps. Before, I'd thought that the first year there were more pulp titles than dime novel titles was 1921. Now, it's 1919.