HP Lovecraft warned readers to stay away from pulp magazines – Cory Doctorow.

Readers should turn to the Bible and Lord Dunsany instead, said Lovecraft in a 1920 letter to the editor of the Omaha Bee.

I interviewed the science fiction writer Robert Charles Wilson, who said he read a letter or essay from some 19th Century person who was denouncing the “boys books” of the time, with their preposterous, ridiculous stories of little boys who run away from home to become sea captains. T

These sorts of books (said the 19th Century literary person) were awful stuff, to be avoided.

Wilson said they sounded awesome to him, and he sought out and read a few, and that became his own excellent novel, “Julian Comstock: A Story of the 22nd Century.”