Wildside Press

I love pulp literature. I love that some small publishing houses are doing their parts to keep pulp lit in print, and sometimes in e-print, as it were. Wildside Press in one of my favorites.

Wildside first came to my attention as an e-book publisher. I bought several volumes from them for my Sony Reader and was pleased with the range of pulp authors I could find. Shortly thereafter, I started buying paperback editions of books from them as well. The print books frequently have great original cover art and a good, easy-to-read font. (As much as I can appreciate fidelity to the multiple-column look of classic pulp mags, sometimes I also like to give my eyes a break.)

I have found that Wildside not only reprints classic pulp novels and collections of short stories, they also publish a variety of modern science-fiction and fantasy novels. Additionally, they are involved in the modern publication of "Weird Tales," the great weird fiction magazine. I am a regular subscriber, and I can hardly wait for the each new edition.

If I have one point of dissatisfaction with pulp reprints through Wildside, it is that OCR-type mistakes tend to pop up in the text. An "o" might become a "p" if the original scanned copy had a smudge in the wrong place, for example. To be fair, some of these might have been errors in the original text. Pulps could have their share of typos, certainly. I have had this experience pull me out of a story a few times, but never has it been so frustrating as to give up entirely.

If you are looking for a good place for classic pulp lit, I recommend Wildside Press. They have a sizable number of Clark Ashton Smith's stories in print, which should be required reading for any pulp fan. They also recently published some of Achmed Abdullah's horror stories as Fear and Other Stories from the Pulps. (Abdullah is perhaps best known for his version of The Thief of Baghdad.) Whether in print form or as an e-book, Wildside has affordable versions of many good books. But you should buy the print forms for their attractive covers.