By the 1950s, adventure science fiction was seen as an embarrassment by those who had once written it for the Clayton Astounding and Amazing Stories. Under the banner of John W Campbell’s Astounding, the new order in the 1940s was to shed the pulp past and move on to that logical, shining, serious genre known as Science Fiction.
But then there was Planet Stories, that little quarterly magazine published by Malcolm Reiss and Love Romance Publications. Stories set on other worlds where heroic men and women face terrible monsters. It was all too Edmond Hamilton for the snobs. (Oddly Edmond Hamilton and Jack Williamson, the two writers who crafted space opera in the 1920s and ’30s never appeared in Planet Stories. Hamilton was writing Superman comics and was pleased to leave Planet Stories to his wife. Jack Williamson was one of the old pros who could satisfy the new rules of SF and was part of that Age of Campbell.)
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https://www.michaelmay.online/2016/06/planet-stories-swimming-against-tide.html
Really enjoyed your piece on PLANET STORIES. I used to buy them from second hand bookshops, THE POPULAR BOOK CENTRES, which were all over London in the sixties. It was difficult to find them in Britain but they did turn up. I had quite a decent collection of them and other American pulps. Used to drive my mum mad because of the bits of brown paper which used to flake off from them. Alas, all sold years back. I did see quite a a collection of the and other pulps in a bookshop in Charing Cross Rd last year. I was tempted to buy them but restrained myself. A great website.
They are all available free now as scans. And no brown crumbs or funky smells.