Pulp Librarian Profile picture
Aug 7, 2021 12 tweets 4 min read Read on X
Time for a pulp countdown now, and today it's my top 10 of modern sins for the professional classes!

Sometimes the only way to go places is by going bad...
At #10: the sin of grade inflation! "Thou shalt not refuse to deduct marks for spelling..."
At #9: the sin of Agile software development! "Thou shalt not hide thy poor interface behind claims of 'permanent Beta'..."
At #8: the sin of unsustainable travel! "Thou shalt not pay to plant a tree and claim it as thy carbon offset..."
At #7: the sin of inferring causation from correlation! "Thou shalt not hide thy methodology 'neath many annexes..."
At #6: the sin of approximeetings! "Thou shalt not say '7.30ish at Nandos' and arrive at ten to nine..."
At #5: the sin of AirB&B tax avoidance! "Thou shalt not claim thou did not know thy rules on income derived from assets..."
At #4: the sin of festival glamping! "Thou shalt not set thy feet within a yurt..."
At #3: the sin of Metro area living! "Thou shalt not buy new build on greenfield sites, nor claim complex part-equity schemes be homeownership..."
At #2: the sin of Google Calendar reliance! "Thou shalt not risk thy schedule on intermittent Wi-Fi..."
And the #1 modern sin is... the sin of VW camper vans! "Thou shalt not indulge thyself in Hipster Stay-cationing..."
That's it for my look at the sins of modern life. Don't let the Devil tempt you...

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More from @PulpLibrarian

Apr 26
It was the biggest manhunt in Britain: police, the press, aeroplanes, psychics all tried to solve the disappearance. In the end nobody really knew what happened. It was a mystery without a solution.

This is the story of Agatha Christie's 11 lost days... Image
By 1926 Agatha Christie's reputation as a writer was starting to grow. Her sixth novel - The Murder of Roger Ackroyd - had been well-received and she and her husband Archie had recently concluded a world tour. But all was not well with the marriage. Image
In April 1926 Agatha Christie’s mother died. Christie was very close to her: she had been home-schooled and believed her mother was clairvoyant. The shock of her sudden death hit the author hard. Image
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Apr 23
Many readers have asked me over the years what my definition of pulp is. I've thought about it a lot, and the definition I keep coming back to... well it may surprise you.

Let me try and set it out. Image
There are lots of definitions of pulp out there: in books, in academic papers and on the web. And most circle back to the same three points: the medium, the story type and the method of writing. Image
Pulp is of course a type of cheap, coarse paper stock. Its use in magazine production from the 1890s onwards led to it becoming a shorthand term for the kind of fiction found in low cost story magazines. Image
Read 29 tweets
Apr 18
let's take a look at the extraordinary work of Victorian illustrator and cat lover Louis Wain! Image
Louis Wain was born in London in 1860. Although he is best known for his drawings of cats he started out as a Victorian press illustrator. His work is highly collectable. Image
Wain had a very difficult life; born with a cleft lip he was not allowed to attend school. His freelance drawing work supported his mother and sisters after his father died. Aged 23 he married his sisters' governess, Emily Richardson, 10 years his senior. Image
Read 13 tweets
Apr 15
Over the years a number of people have asked me if I have a favourite pulp film. Well I do. It's this one.

This is the story of Alphaville...
Alphaville: une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution (1965) was Jean-Luc Godard’s ninth feature film. A heady mix of spy noir, science fiction and the Nouvelle Vague at its heart is a poetic conflict between a hard-boiled secret agent and a supercomputer’s brave new world. Image
British writer Peter Cheyney had created the fictitious American investigator Lemmy Caution in 1936. As well as appearing in 10 novels Caution featured in over a dozen post-war French films, mostly played by singer Eddie Constantine whom Godard was keen to work with. Image
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Apr 10
Al Hartley may have been famous for his work on Archie Comics, but in the 1970s he was drawn to a very different scene: God.

Today in pulp I look back at Hartley's work for Spire Christian Comics - a publisher that set out to spread the groovy gospel... Image
Spire Christian Comics was an offshoot of Spire Books, a mass-market religious paperback line launched in 1963 by the Fleming H. Revell company. The point of Spire Books was to get religious novels into secular stores, so a move into comic books in 1972 seemed a logical choice. Image
The idea was to create comic book versions of popular Spire Books like The Cross and the Switchblade; David Wilkinson's autobiographical tale of being a pastor in 1960s New York. It had already been turned into a film, but who could make it into a comic? Image
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Apr 4
Given the state of the stock market I thought I'd share my pulp guide to money. What is it? Where does it come from? And does it make us happy?

Let's take a look...
Money is just a token, like a football sticker. In itself it has no intrinsic worth. However it is desirable because, well, football!

Initially the value of all stickers is the same, because there's an abundant supply... Image
However as you fill up your sticker album the value of your existing stickers drops and the value of your missing ones rises.

This is due to scarcity: the law of supply and demand starts to determine worth and value, rather than which team you support. Image
Read 19 tweets

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