Growing up in the 1970s, Edgar Rice Burroughs had wonderful artists like Frank Frazetta, Boris Vallejo and Roy G. Krenkel to illustrate his paperback covers. In comics, Russ Manning and Joe Kubert drew Tarzan, Dave Cockrum, Gil Kane and later Ruby Nebres rendered Barsoom and and Mike Kaluta drew Carson of Venus. You knew the stories were older than that if you read the copyright statements (For some reason this always interested me. Still does.) Publications like All-Story and Argosy took on a weird glamor of ancient history. I dreamed of old magazines filled with old but fascinating illustrations. I was half right, and also terribly wrong.
It would take the ERB-dom fanzine to start me down the road to reality. The fact was the Munsey magazines weren’t splashed with illustrations. (Not true of Munsey’s competitor, Blue Book, but we will save that for another day.) I did learn of the wonderful art of J. Allen St. John but he did book covers and illustrations for other magazines. I saw the images created by Frank R. Paul for Hugo Gernsback. I was familiar with the newspaper comic strips of Hal Foster and Burne Hogarth from reprints in the DC Comics. The truth of it was that after 1960 is when the real explosion of artwork was created by artists and fans.
The Edgar Rice Burroughs fan of 1914 for instance, didn’t even have Elmo Lincoln yet. No comic strips by Hal Foster, no Blue Book serials, even J. Allen St. John was waiting in the wings. That new fan of ERB had one place for images, the covers of All-Story. The interiors provided a small illustration that was used throughout the serial to help the reader recognize each installment but these did not offer much. It was that cover, usually painted by F. W. Small or P. J. Monahan that inspired them to read each amazing tale.
Here are some of these covers. There are plenty of surprises here. Images I had never seen for The Cave Girl and The Mucker, blond Tarzans, movie tie-ins (you thought that was a 1970s thing, didn’t you?), and all those later Westerns. You can see Tarzan go from a moment in literary history to just another pot boiler, no different from the historicals and Westerns Argosy used to pump out weekly. It’s a little sad but intriguing too. All-Story/Argosy was such a part of Burroughs’ climb from the thirty-five year old failed business man to one of the richest and most famous authors in the world. Edgar Rice Burroughs was the American dream. A dream splashed across the covers of the Munsey magazines.
Next time, Blue Book. And that’s another story altogether.