January 25, 2011 - June 17, 2011
6th Floor Gallery, Bird Library and SUArt Galleries, Schaffer Art Building
The exhibit, which spans two locations, will be available from January 25th until June 17th. On display in the sixth-floor SCRC gallery will be pulp magazines, notably titles like Weird Tales and Amazing Stories; the typescript of Isaac Asimov's "Strange Playfellow," which introduced readers to one of science fiction's best known characters, Robbie the Robot; and correspondence with figures like Ray Bradbury. The SCRC gallery is open on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and on Tuesday and Thursday, from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m.
SUArt Galleries in the Shaffer Art Building will present a profile of pulp artist Norman Saunders (1907-1989), including ten lush and dramatic Saunders paintings from the university collection. SUArt Galleries is open Tuesday through Sunday, from 11 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., and Thursday, from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Named for the cheap and abundant wood pulp that publishers after 1850 began using to print reading materials for a mass audience, pulp magazines sported eye-catching covers and included detective, adventure, western, horror, romance, and science fiction stories. According to co-curator Sean Quimby, director of SCRC, "This was literature tailored to specific tastes, intended to entertain in predictable ways." He notes that "even while the form of the pulp magazine died by 1960, the concept of pulp lives on in glossy photo-dense magazines, paperback novels, comic books, and film." Quimby maintains that pulp magazines, with their intensely involved readership, "helped make possible contemporary interactive media culture."
Gary Shaheen, a senior vice president at the university's Burton Blatt Institute and a lifelong collector of pulp magazines, co-curated the exhibit. Kingma, Inc., which is owned and operated by Bruce and Susan Kingma, sponsored the exhibit and its accompanying guidebook.
