IN the first decades of the twentieth century, middle-class, consumer-oriented magazines were typically seen as a middle ground between the pulps and the avant-garde magazines of the period. The first pulp magazine, Argosy, was created by Frank Munsey in 1896. It was 7 x 10 inches in size and printed on inexpensive pulp paper. The magazine was a huge commercial success in the US and beyond, and was followed by a large body of similar periodicals. They were usually monthlies, and while they had garish covers, their internal pages consisted of densely packed type with few illustrations. The success of the pulps was entwined with the development of several popular genres, most notably hard-boiled detective fiction. But they were dismissed as ‘lowbrow’ publications that proved, in the rather snobbish words of H. L. Mencken, cultural critic and one-time owner of the pulp Black Mask, that ‘nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American people’ (Douglas 90). By contrast, mainstream magazines, which emerged in the US in the 1880s and in Canada in the first decades of the twentieth century, targeted a wide middle-class audience with increasing amounts of disposable income. This was the audience advertisers most wished to reach, and mainstream magazines proved an effective medium for promoting consumer goods and services, partly because their glossy paper stock was ideal for printing colour images and partly because they addressed a national audience. Usually 11 x 14 inches in size, these monthly or twice-monthly titles contained not only advertisements, but also lavish illustrations and, later, full-colour photo spreads.