No debate there, paperbacks kept pulp alive, and are largely what we owe the current state of genre fiction and even our current pulp renaissance. But I still maintain that pulp never recovered from WW2, and that the golden age of pulp ended at that same time. After all we went from having dozens of different magazines being published at a time, to just a handful, most of which didn't last very long.

For the magazine absolutely, but pulp as a genre was kept alive by the pulp novel with the decline of the magazine. But these books are still generally considered pulp genre (I believe they are differentiated by pulp magazine and pulp literature). I found this somewhere:

"Many of the paperback houses that contributed to the decline of the genre–Ace, Dell, Avon, among others–were actually started by pulp magazine publishers. They had the presses, the expertise, and the newsstand distribution networks which made the success of the mass-market paperback possible. These pulp-oriented paperback houses mined the old magazines for reprints. This kept pulp literature, if not pulp magazines, alive."

I didn't say it wasn't pulp, only that pulp was dwindling by that time period. By the time you get through WW2 only the bigger magazines remained, a lot of what was left moved to slick or digest format. By the time you get into the 50's the rise of paperbacks took up most of the slack in popular genre fiction, so it's mostly specialized material like the Sci-Fi mags, which by the end of the decade had almost entirely ceased to be pulp proper.

Your right about that, except there is more then one kind of pulp. There was the 20-40s pulp, more along the Dashiell Hammett range (the first indiana jones movie is a great example of modern interpretation of this pulp). There was a "pulp" of the late 40's and 50's which Conan is a great example. The 4th Indiana Jones movie was a good modern example of this type of pulp.

Although when you just say pulp, yea, you are usually referring to the 20s through 40s stuff.

Those dates actually a bit off, the 40's and 50's were when pulp was mostly winding down, the 20's and 30's were the height of pulp but it began way back in 1896. As far as where to start, well that depends entirely on what kind of fiction you're interested in, the pulps were made in every genre. If you just want a sampling then pulpgen.com has over a thousand stories, most of them short, divided up by magazine, everything from hard-boiled detectives, to damsel saving adventurers, to sappy romances.

If you like crime fiction then I recommend Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. If you like adventure then I recommend just about anything by Edgar Rice Burroughs especially the Tarzan and John Carter of Mars novels, also you can never go wrong with Doc Savage.

If you want to purchase actual books there's been a huge increase in interest, and therefore publication, of pulp reprints lately. There have been two big omnibuses of crime fiction The Big Book of Pulps and The Big Book of Black Mask, the latter of which collects stories from Black Mask Magazine, the magazine that inspired the movie the most. Sanctum press sells the Conde Nast heroes (Doc Savage, The Shadow, and The Avenger basically the big names). Atlus Press publishes omnibuses containing the lesser known heroes (Ki-Gor, The Black Bat, Secret Agent X etc.) in complete volumes in publication order. Girasol Collectables reprints The Spider and does replicas of pulp mags ads and all, pricy but very nice. Radio Archives does ebooks of The Spider, Operator #5 and a few others. Finally Adventure House has High Adventure a bimonthly publication that usually spotlights a single character, either a whole novel, or a handful of shorter stories, they also do replicas of various pulps.

EDIT: Apologies for the incredibly disjointed and poorly put together post, I kept adding on and rearranging it, resulting in the mess you see before you.

I'll be honest and say I have not read much from the 40's and 50's time period. If I wanted to start, which should I start with? Would the library have them?
I loved the movie by the way. Tons of blood and guts ~ my kind of movie.

I think you misunderstood what they are talking about. Pulp fiction the movie is not based off of a book. What he is talking about is a genre of books from the 40's and 50's called pulp fiction.

Way funny because I had no clue what this was about either. I was thinking of the John Travolta movie too. I have to say that I hated that movie. I've never read any pulp comics though.

This is actually one of the very few that I watched but never had the chance to read. I might need to snag it sometime soon as its been a few months since I have gotten any new books lately.

Ha, funny.

The magazines he is talking about is actually what Tarantino named the movie after. He envisioned his movie as an updated form of the classic pulp books.