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Across the western world, from the immediate post-war years to the mid-1960s, a form of popular culture flourished, fostering its own aesthetic and influencing every other cultural practice. Now best known for its gloriously lurid popularism, pulp publishing played an important part in shaping how the generations rebuilding after WWII saw themselves.

Richard Holt will draw on his own passion for pulp publishing, and a collection of many thousands of original pulp novels and magazines from the period, to investigate pulps as a publishing phenomenon unlike any before it, or any we are likely to see again. He'll consider the underappreciated roles the pulps played in education, socio-economics, politics and culture. And he’ll look at how face-out sales in news stands drove innovations in book design, typography and graphic art that continue to influence designers today.