#argosy

[retro-scifi-and-fantasy-art]

Cover artist: Rudolph Belarski (American, 1900-1983) Argosy Weekly, January 7, 1939

[keepingitneutral]

Restored 1974 Airstream 'Argosy'

Courtesy: Adele & Mario Torres

[mustelidsinlove]

Dramione one shots that are never far from my thoughts

[in no particular order; mind the tags — some of these are dark]

As Sharp as Any Thorn by Argosy [E, 8.8k]

The road to redemption is a winding one. Christmas at Grimmauld Place, Post HBP.

Art: Night and Her Daughter Sleep (detail), Mary L. Macomber, 1902

Scenes from a Marriage by hiddenhibernian [T, 5.4k]

They say love isn't about what you say, it's what you do. If you see it that way, Hermione doesn't have any reason to complain.

Art: The Lovers, Akseli Gallen-Kallela, c. 1907-1917

Grit by witchsoup [T, 4k]

Hermione attempts to diagnose a secretive patient suffering major curse damage.

Art: Hands Grasping 7, Susan Manspeizer, 2018

remedia amoris by magneticwave [M, 14.7k]

The most amazing thing about Malfoy is not that he managed to build a successful Ministry career out of the total disgrace of his family, but that somehow Hermione only despises him half of the time that they work together.

Art: Circe Offering up the Cup to Ulysses (detail), John William Waterhouse, 1891

Inside by onebedtorulethemall [M, 7.5k]

Something is wrong with Draco Malfoy.

Art: Illustration from The West Wing, Edward Gorey, 1963

With Teeth by provocative_envy [M, 5.4k]

Albus Dumbledore had been wrong about Voldemort’s horcruxes.

Art: Escape Before the Dawn, Devinez, 2023

On the Virtues of Inexhaustible Burning by PacificRimbaud [T, 5k]

In which Draco Malfoy wrestles geology and Hermione receives several gifts.

Art: Saint Augustine (detail), Philippe de Champaigne, c. 1645-1650

I am Sleeping on a Time Bomb by i forgot to blink [M, 4k]

The war is over, and they go to Antarctica.

Art: Barne Glacier, Herbert Pointing, 1911

Tromp as Writ by a_rum_of_one's_own [E, 7.2k]

‘Merlin and Morgana, what’s that?’ he breathed. ‘Muggle underwear. We’re beyond chemises, you know.’ ‘Granger,’ he said. ‘Granger. You can’t. This isn’t fair.'

Art: Saturnina Canaleta de Girona (detail), Federico de Madrazo y Kuntz, 1856

Reset by provocative_envy [M, 4.5k]

And the fear—the fear that he’s learned to swallow, choke on, bury the crushed and fragmented shards of—it's turning the space between him and her and the last six weeks, the last six months, into a gaping yawning brutally invincible chasm; a wall to scale and a cliff to jump and a step he’s never quite been brave enough to take. She takes it for him. Of course she does.

Art: Joan of Arc, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1882

Chiaroscuro by ifyouwereamelody [T, 5.1k]

Draco Malfoy returns to Hogwarts for sixth year a changed man. Marked, dangerous, and tasked with something terrible, he finds himself haunted by memories of the year before — a bright spark of connection that now he's got no choice but to douse.

Art: Vengeance is Sworn (detail) from the Revenge Triptych, Francesco Hayez, 1851

The Street Where You Live by scullyvasan [T, 10.5k]

Muggle childhood AU. Single mother Narcissa Malfoy co-parents her son Draco and functionally parents the little girl down the street. Light homages to Books 1-4 but no wands, no wizards, no Hogwarts — just human magic and the passing years at work.

Art: Daydreams, Thomas Couture, 1859

The Running Club by winterwells [E, 10.4k]

Hermione returns to Hogwarts for the "Seventh Year Was A Cluster F*** So Let's All Do It Again!" year. The war has left its mark, and she copes in the best way she can. Running. And she might pick up some stragglers along the way...

Art: Stripes of Silence, Lu Guada, 2012

Whistle by witchsoup [T, 1.5k]

Hermione spends the majority of her time on the tube, or dashing around Sainsbury's hunting for the last of the vegetarian wraps for her two-thirds-complete meal deal. Though it would be somewhat off-brand, she feels that it's well within her rights to ask David Cameron to lower the price of a meal deal, while he's at it. Possibly her rent, too.

Art: Untitled, Isabel Bishop, c. 1940s-1960s

Lights Out by Phoebe [E, 10.2k]

She smiles, and it enrages him further. Granger is afraid of many things. She's afraid of what lies outside Hogwarts, what could be lurking within the walls. She's afraid of Voldemort, and probably of his father. And she is inexplicably, illogically afraid of the dark. But she's not afraid of him.

Art: The Woman with the Candle (detail), Cornelis Visscher II, c. 1643-1658

Salvage by storycat9 [T, 1k]

Who is Hermione Granger when there’s no one left to protect?

Art: After Igor Svyatoslavich's fighting with the Cumans, Viktor Vasnetsov, 1880

The Object Lesson by Fleurizel [M, 13.6k]

When Hermione is forced to spend a weekend at the Bulstrodes’ country estate glad-handing for the Ministry, she finds an unlikely ally in the only other house guest who hadn’t fled the country when the war broke out: Draco Malfoy.

Art: Hands of the Puppeteer, Mexico City, Tina Modotti, 1929

i think i've seen this film before by magneticwave [T, 24.8k]

It doesn’t occur to Harry until supper that night, while Luna makes a Spanish tortilla with pink and blue potatoes from her garden, that Granger might actually be his friend now. Not just a transferable friend, comfortable with him because she’d grown up with a strangely domestic alternative version of him with short hair, but a real friend. Since he’s not sure how to feel about it, he eats his half of the tortilla in a silent daze and then helps Luna go over the last of the proofs for next week’s Quibbler. 

Art: Still Life with Orange by Süleyman Seyyid Bey, c. 1900

Party Lines by PacificRimbaud [E, 10k]

As the dust settles in the 2000 United States Presidential election, Ivy League student Hermione Granger goes to three different parties, in an effort to think about something- anything- other than the state of Florida. So does that argumentative trust fund prick, Draco Malfoy. A college AU all about enemies who...aren't.

Art: Jasper Johns, Edisto Beach, Ugo Mulas, 1964

i have gone at dusk through narrow streets by i forgot to blink [T, 4k]

Draco, Hermione, and what came before and after the end.

Art: Interior Strandgade 30, Vilhelm Hammershøi, 1901

Breathe by Argosy [T, 14.5k]

The war is over and everyone wants something from Hermione. But that's nothing new; she can handle it. Really.

Art: Cupid and Psyché (detail), François Gérard, 1798

[charnel-grounds]

“Second Sight”

Argosy Vol. 269 #1, January 6, 1940

source

[spacenoirdetective]

Paul Stahr, May 1935

"Hell Island" is a pretty good title.

[thefugitivesaint]

Robert Arthur Graef (1879-1951), ''Argosy'', Vol. 201, #6, 1929

[obsidian-sphere]

“Argosy,” October 10, 1931. Cover art by Paul Stahr for Theodore Roscoe’s Haiti Novelette, “The Voodoo Express.”

Voodoo choo choo!

[thepopculturearchivist]

The Complete Man's Magazine

An S-tier of men's magazines would have two titles: Fawcett is TRUE and Popular Publications' ARGOSY. They were the ones with slick pages, full-color illustrations, and ads for credible brands. TRUE was born a men's magazine, while ARGOSY became one. It dated back to 1882 and by the 1920s it was a weekly pulp magazine. It was, to be more exact, one of the "big four" general-interest pulps, along with ADVENTURE, BLUE BOOK and SHORT STORIES. These weren't genre-specific like BLACK MASK (crime) and WEIRD TALES (horror/fantasy) and so don't enjoy those two's lofty historic reputation as laboratories for genre creation. The people who wrote for ARGOSY aren't in the literary canon like Hammett, Chandler and Lovecraft, but many were immensely popular in their time, e.g. Edgar Rice Burroughs, Max Brand, A. Merritt, etc. ARGOSY in its peak pulp form is awesome in retrospect: 144 pages of fiction across the genre map, including novelettes, short stories and multiple serials every week, with writers waiting for rediscovery or reappraisal.

But the Munsey company bled ARGOSY dry by 1942, sacrificing their flagship title to a hare-brained self-destructive brand expansion. The page count started dropping in 1938. In early 1941 it switched from standard pulp format to magazine ( or "bedsheet") format, having already given up cover art in favor of a generic cover design, presumably for the sake of good taste. By fall 1941 it was no longer weekly. In early 1942 it went from biweekly to monthly. Munsey clearly meant to turn ARGOSY into a men's magazine on the model of TRUE (while retaining fiction) and brought back original cover art, of a sort. The results were unattractive.

By the end of 1942 ARGOSY was done for. Popular Publications, probably the top pulp publisher of the time -- best known for hero pulps like THE SPIDER and G-8 AND HIS BATTLE ACES, swooped in to save ARGOSY, as they had done previously with ADVENTURE and BLACK MASK. Popular boss Harry Steeger apparently thought ARGOSY had been moving in the right direction, however ineptly, but he reverted the venerable title to a pulp for several months before a major revamp in late 1943 for the bedsheet relaunch. You could see the difference immediately.

Fiction still predominated but non-fiction took a gradually increasing share if space, and the fiction itself became more mainstream. The objective still seemed to be TRUE plus fiction -- the fiction, presumably, making ARGOSY "The Complete Man's Magazine."

By the 1950s non-fiction predominated, though you still got several short stories and one novelette per issue. ARGOSY's star writer in this period was Erle Stanley Gardner, a prolific contributor in the pulp days. Gardner saved Perry Mason for the slicks but gave ARGOSY the next best thing: the "Court of Last Resort," in which the great man, once a defense attorney in real life, took on real-life cases where defendants appeared to have been railroaded or victimized by incompetent defense and/or prosecution. Beyond Gardner, ARGOSY touched many of the same men's-service bases that TRUE did, while publishing fiction by big names of the time or, in the case of young Elmore Leonard, big names of the future.

Fiction's share continued to decline through the 1960s, and toward the end of the line in the late 1970s ARGOSY gave up on fiction altogether. Like TRUE, it never went sleazy or fetishistic, but probably lost credibility by embracing the "In Search Of" mythos of cryptids, UFOs, the Bermuda Triangle, etc. Popular sold out before the end of the decade, and the title didn't last long beyond that. There have been attempts to revive it, and the current rights holder publishes collections from the pulp days in print and online, but there seems to be no market now for anything ARGOSY ever was as a magazine.