The Pulp Magazine Archive

It wasn't long after I first discovered science fiction that I found out about science fiction magazines. My dad often stopped off at a second-hand bookstore to pick up reading material, and I found that the store sold used copies of science fiction magazines like Astounding/Analog, Worlds of IF, and Galaxy for a nickel. When I was a teen and had a little more disposable income, I started buying the magazines new each month, especially Analog. 

Later, I bought a large collection of magazines and had an almost complete run of Analog and Fantasy and Science Fiction from 1950 into the 80s (which I eventually sold for lack of space, sigh). When I moved to Toronto in the 1980s, I often visited The Spaced Out Library (now the Merill Collection) to browse through the stacks and fondle some of the older pulps (very gently and with permission of the librarians, of course).

Now it turns out that the Internet Archive has set up The Pulp Magazine Archive, and many of the magazines that I used to read, and many, many more, are available for reading online. The collection isn't limited to science fiction; there are over 13,000 issues in total of dozens of different magazines spanning a wide range of genres and subjects. But I'm mostly interested in the science fiction and fantasy genres.

I could browse through this for hours just looking at the covers, some of which are incredibly garish.

The collection isn't complete. For example, there are no issues of the US edition of Analog Science Fiction Science Fact (renamed from Astounding Stories in 1960), although there are many issues of Asimov's Science Fiction magazine, which started in the 1970s. But I'll take the almost complete run of Astounding quite happily. 

One more image - the cover from the first issue of Galaxy Science Fiction in 1950.