My father was a reader. But during the Great Depression books were hard to come by. We didn’t live near a library. Gas to go there was expensive when he only earned forty dollars a month working on a farm, doing the milking and field work. But there was some reading material available at a low price. The pulp Western novels, costing ten or fifteen cents, filled the bill. We couldn’t even afford a newspaper subscription.

What did the pulp Western look like? It was about ten by seven inches and a half a inch thick. What was unique were the pages. It was printed on the cheap pulp paper as was the daily newspaper. There were jagged edges to the pages. It did have a glossy cover, however. Dad kept a stack of them at the side of his chair in the living room. He would re=read them until he could get to town to buy a new one. Reading by lamplight in the evenings after supper, it was his only entertainment.

My brothers and I were forbidden to even touch his precious Westerns. But being forbidden to do something never stopped me. I remember sneaking into the living room when Mother was busy elsewhere. I would take only the top book from the pile. Dad had a memory like a steel trap. If the order of the books was changed, he knew one of my brothers or me had been going through his precious pulp Westerns. The glossy covers were beautiful. I would run my hand over their glossy, smooth surface trying to figure out what the story line might be. I never read one of them. I tried. There were too many big words that this then five year old couldn’t understand.

Dad was born in 1899, the turn of the century. He was familiar with the West. It was still a bit wild. Dad had worked on a sheep ranch at the end of the Great War. He didn’t stay in Idaho very long. Sheep were not his favorite livestock. He was anxious to get back home among family and familiar surroundings.

Pulp Westerns were most popular during the Great Depression. Many famous authors contributed to their popularity. Included was my favorite author, Zane Grey. His were the first books I read. My girl friends were reading the Nancy Drew Mysteries. Not me. I liked the Western genre. I remember a time when Dad and I were both reading our books. Mother yelled at us. “Get your noses out of those books and talk to me!” Mother’s reading was limited to the newspaper. She preferred listening to the radio with its then popular “swing” music. I never read a pulp Western. By the time I was old enough to read anything but the Dick and Jane series, they were a thing of the past. Radio and television replaced them. I have since learned the Mark Twain, Ellery Queen and Agatha Christi were among the famous authors who wrote pulp fiction stories.

They may be a thing of the past, but they can’t take away my memories of Dad sitting by lamplight lost in the pages of a pulp fiction Western. I still read and reread Zane Grey, but in large print because of macular degeneration. I receive books, at no cost, in the mail from the Tennessee Library for Accessible Books and Media. If you are interested in receiving them, contact the Maynardville Library.

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