Tarzan, Mars, Zorro: the pulp that launched them all
Wikipedia's August 28 Featured Article follows The All-Story Magazine from Munsey's second pulp to the first print appearances of Tarzan, Barsoom, and Zorro—and the merger that erased its own name.
In October 1912, a Munsey pulp put a loinclothed man and a lion on its cover and printed the first appearance of Tarzan in any medium. A century later, one surviving copy of that issue sold for $59,750. Wikipedia's Featured Article for August 28, 2026 — The All-Story Magazine — follows the Frank Munsey pulp that launched Tarzan, Barsoom, Pellucidar, and Zorro, then disappeared into Argosy and left its afterlife in reprint magazines and auction rooms. 12
The source in one glance
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| What was it? | A U.S. pulp magazine of all-fiction stories founded by Frank Munsey. 2 |
| Who edited it? | Robert H. Davis, with Thomas Newell Metcalf as managing editor. 2 |
| When did it run? | January 1905 to July 17, 1920, then merged into Argosy. 2 |
| Famous firsts? | Edgar Rice Burroughs's Mars and Tarzan stories; Johnston McCulley's Zorro. 2 |
| How did it end? | Absorbed into Argosy All-Story Weekly; the All-Story name later returned on a love-story magazine that lasted until 1955. 2 |
Munsey builds a second pulp
In 1882 Frank Munsey launched The Golden Argosy as a children's weekly. By 1896 he had switched The Argosy to coarse pulp paper and all-fiction contents, creating the first pulp magazine. Competitors followed — Street & Smith's The Popular Magazine in 1903, Story-Press's The Monthly Story Magazine in 1905 — and Munsey answered with another title of his own. 2
The All-Story Magazine appeared in January 1905 on a monthly schedule. Munsey hired Robert H. Davis as editor. Davis had been fiction editor of Munsey's Magazine after Munsey sold the New York Sunday News in 1904; he brought in Thomas Newell Metcalf as managing editor. The magazine stayed monthly until March 1914, then went weekly. In May 1914 Munsey merged it with another of his pulps, The Cavalier, as All-Story Cavalier Weekly. A year later the Cavalier name dropped away. The title ran as All-Story Weekly until July 17, 1920, when it was folded into The Argosy and retitled Argosy All-Story Weekly. 2
Pages before the icons
The first issue opened with five novel installments, including W. Bert Foster's When Time Slipped a Cog, about a man who finds a year of his life gone from memory. Two short stories were already science fiction: Howard R. Garis's "The Ghost at Box 13" and Margaret Prescott Montague's "The Great Sleep Tanks." The May 1905 issue reprinted Garrett P. Serviss's The Moon Metal, about a lunar metal that replaces gold as a fiscal standard. Serviss returned in 1909 with A Columbus of Space; science-fiction historian Sam Moskowitz later wrote that the serialization "caused some to class Serviss as the equal of Jules Verne." 2
Mary Roberts Rinehart's first story, "A Gasoline Road Agent," appeared in April 1905. Davis encouraged her, and her first novel, The Circular Staircase, ran from November 1906 to March 1907; in book form it became the first major success of her career. Max Brand sold his first Western novel, The Untamed, serialized from December 1918. Ray Cummings began with "The Girl in the Golden Atom" on March 15, 1919 — one of the most popular stories he ever wrote. Other contributors included Rex Stout, Raymond S. Spears, Murray Leinster, Tod Robbins, Perley Poore Sheehan, and W. Adolphe Roberts, who later helped lead Jamaica's independence movement. The magazine also printed poetry by Djuna Barnes. Edwin Baird, later the founding editor of Weird Tales, made his first sale to All-Story in 1906. 2
Early covers were unsteady. The first issue put the words "Something New" in script on a red field. The second showed two cowboys. The third announced a circulation of 200,000. After that, artwork filled every cover, though the pictures often had no connection to the stories inside. John Clute later called All-Story and its companion Argosy "the most important pulps of their era." 2
Burroughs finds Mars, then the jungle
Edgar Rice Burroughs was thirty-five and failing in business in the summer of 1911 when he began a novel "very surreptitiously," later recalling that he was "very much ashamed of my new vocation" and that writing "seemed a foolish thing for a full grown man to be doing." By August he had enough pages to send All-Story a manuscript titled "Dejah Thoris, Martian Princess," with a covering letter that the finished story would run about three times the 43,000 words already submitted. Metcalf answered with guarded enthusiasm, asked for cuts, and capped the length at 70,000 words. In November he bought the rewritten story for $400 — about $14,000 in 2025 dollars. Four months of work for that sum left Burroughs unimpressed. 2
Serialized from February to July 1912 as Under the Moons of Mars, the tale opened Burroughs's Barsoom cycle — "Barsoom" being Mars in the series — and helped define planetary romance. Burroughs had wanted the byline "Normal Bean," to signal that the author was an ordinary person despite the fantasy. A typesetter changed it to "Norman Bean," and Burroughs dropped the pseudonym thereafter. A sequel under his real name later drew a complaint from one reader who said Burroughs had not "continued the story the way the original author would have done." 2
Metcalf rejected Burroughs's next submission, then bought Tarzan of the Apes after Burroughs outlined it in March 1912 and delivered the manuscript in June. It filled the October 1912 issue. The next three Barsoom novels — The Gods of Mars, The Warlord of Mars, and Thuvia, Maid of Mars — also appeared in All-Story. Later Tarzan novels and stories returned there after a temporary move to New Story Magazine. The Pellucidar hollow-Earth series began in the same magazine with At the Earth's Core and Pellucidar. By 1914 Metcalf was paying Burroughs two and a half cents a word. By the 1920 merger, nearly two dozen Burroughs stories and serials had run in All-Story. 2
Demand for more of the same pulled other writers into the field. Austin Hall, Homer Eon Flint, Junius B. Smith, John U. Giesy, Charles B. Stilson, and Victor Rousseau sold science-fiction tales in the mid-1910s. Abraham Merritt's first story, "Through the Dragon Glass," appeared in 1917; "The Moon Pool" and its sequel followed in 1918–1919. When Hugo Gernsback launched Amazing Stories in 1926, he found that fantastic romance sold better than hard technical speculation and reprinted "The Moon Pool" in May 1927. 2
In 2006 Heritage Auctions of Dallas sold a copy of the October 1912 All-Story — the first appearance of Tarzan in any medium — for $59,750, about $95,000 in 2025 dollars, a record for any pulp magazine at the time. 2
Zorro and the long roster
Johnston McCulley's vigilante Zorro entered print in All-Story with the August–September 1919 serialization of The Curse of Capistrano, then continued in Argosy after the 1920 merger. Eldred Kurtz Means's "Tickfall" stories about Black Americans in Louisiana moved from Cavalier into All-Story when the titles combined. The magazine's pages also carried Westerns, mysteries, horror, and fantasy from writers who later defined other pulp markets. 2
Title changes, merger, and reprint afterlife
The magazine's title shortened from The All-Story Magazine to The All-Story in June 1911, became All-Story Weekly with the March 7, 1914 issue, ran as All-Story Cavalier Weekly from May 16, 1914 to May 8, 1915, then returned to All-Story Weekly until the July 17, 1920 merger. Argosy All-Story Weekly kept that combined name until 1929. That year Munsey's reorganized again: Munsey's Magazine fed a new love-story title called All-Story, soon retitled All-Story Love Stories, which continued until 1955, while Argosy All-Story Weekly became simply Argosy. 2
By the 1930s, readers asked for stories they had heard of but could no longer find. Munsey answered in 1939 with Famous Fantastic Mysteries, a reprint magazine built from Argosy and All-Story Weekly material. Fantastic Novels followed in 1940 to carry longer stories without serialization; it lasted five issues before closing in 1941, while Famous Fantastic Mysteries ran for 81 issues through June 1953. Popular Publications later revived Fantastic Novels for twenty more issues between 1948 and 1951. In 1970 Sam Moskowitz edited Under the Moons of Mars, an anthology of Munsey "scientific romance"; seven of its nine stories had first appeared in All-Story. 2
Five details to remember
- Munsey built All-Story as a second pulp beside Argosy. It launched monthly in January 1905 under Robert H. Davis and ended as an independent weekly on July 17, 1920. 2
- Burroughs's first sale paid $400. Under the Moons of Mars (1912) started Barsoom; Tarzan of the Apes filled the October 1912 issue that later set a pulp auction record. 2
- Zorro debuted here in 1919. Johnston McCulley's The Curse of Capistrano serialized in August and September before continuing in Argosy. 2
- The title changed four times before the merger. Monthly All-Story, weekly All-Story, All-Story Cavalier Weekly, then All-Story Weekly again. 2
- The afterlife was reprint, not revival. Famous Fantastic Mysteries and Fantastic Novels kept Munsey fantasy in print for decades after the original magazine vanished into Argosy. 2
Two lines from the source
Edgar Rice Burroughs, remembering how he began the Mars novel:
"I was very much ashamed of my new vocation ... It seemed a foolish thing for a full grown man to be doing" 2
John Clute, placing the magazine in pulp history:
"the most important pulps of their era." 2
Wikipedia's article leaves All-Story as the machine that turned unknown manuscripts into lasting popular icons, then lost its own name. Tarzan, John Carter, and Zorro outlived the weekly that first printed them. The pulp that discovered them survives as a citation trail, a reprint shelf, and one October 1912 cover that collectors still chase.
Today's selection is Wikipedia's Featured Article for August 28, 2026: The All-Story Magazine, selected by Wikipedia's editorial community. 1
References
- 1Wikipedia's Today's featured article for August 28, 2026
en.wikipedia.org
- 2The All-Story Magazine - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
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