The Pulps were a remarkable phenomenon that lasted, depending on how one defines them, from 1896 to 1954 and perhaps beyond. They were all story magazines printed on the cheapest paper imaginable by publishers so cheap they won't go the few extra dollars to have the edges trimmed. They sold in the tens of thousands, occasionally in the hundreds of thousands.
Opinion is divided as to when the heigh-day of the pulps was.
Some would say it was during the teens and twenties when general fare, family oriented titles like Argosy had their highest sales. Others hold for the thirties when the pulps exploded into a hundred different titles catering to an incredible diverse number of specialized markets. There were Western and Detective pulps, Sports and Romance, Science Fiction and Adventure. Andn the truly strange, like Zeppelin Stories which only printed stories about the great airships and Submarine Stories where sailors never saw the light of day. There were basically three types of stories lead by women.