"The Black Mask" Playing Cards

Pulp fiction aficionados will love this seedy looking cover on the back of their playing cards. Even the cards themselves look a bit guilty and seedy! The Black Mask pictures the pulp fiction world of decades ago. Mystery, murder and mayhem were wrapped in cheap news pulp and churned out for the reading masses at even cheaper prices. Pulp magazines (often referred to as "the pulps") were inexpensive fiction magazines that were published from 1896 to the 1950s. The term pulp derives from the cheap wood pulp paper on which the magazines were printed, in run-of-the-mill, low-quality literature. Pulps were the successors to the penny dreadfuls, dime novels, and short-fiction magazines of the 19th century.