What Does Vintage Makeup Have to Do With Pulp Fiction?

I had one of those sharp little clicks today. Looking at vintage makeup collector Erin Parsons (youtube.com/@erinparson…), it suddenly hit me:

She’s doing the same thing I’m doing with #PulpArchaeology.

Her objects are old lipsticks, powder boxes, and beauty ads. Mine are pulp magazines, dust jackets, and beat-up hardbacks.

Different stuff. Same method.

You find something that survived. You get hooked. You start collecting. Then the questions come fast: What was this? Who made it? Who used it? What have we forgotten?

Pretty soon collecting turns into research, research into interpretation, and interpretation into something worth sharing.

That’s how Erin built the Makeup Archive. That’s what Lucina Press is doing with pulp.

A Chelsea House dust jacket isn’t just a nice old picture to me. It’s a clue. Why this image? Who was it aimed at? What can the physical book tell us that a plain title list never will?

One old book is interesting. A stack of them becomes evidence.

That’s #PulpArchaeology. I’m not collecting curios. I’m digging into the culture that made them.

It’s also why I’m building the Lucina Press Exhibition Hall — a place where one good cover can lead you to an artist, a publisher, a pattern, and suddenly you’re investigating something you never expected.

The real spark? Paying close attention to the past starts feeding what you make right now. That’s part of what’s behind Out of the Aethers. Not playing space opera dress-up 1935 — asking what happens when you take what worked then and build something new with it.

The past becomes a laboratory. The objects keep talking.

You just have to listen.

That’s the job at Lucina Press. One obscure book at a time.

#PulpArchaeology #StoryResonance #LucinaPress