7 Questions With Robert Deis, Editor of the Men's Adventure Library Book Series

 

Robert Deis is the Editor of the Men’s Adventure Library book series, the Men's Adventure Quarterly  magazine and  MensPulpMags.com . In the magazine and in many books, Deis edits reprints of original stories and artwork from the Men's Adventure magazines popular  from the 1940s to the 1970s.  Catering to a male audience, these magazines commonly featured action/adventure, crime and war stories, exposés, exotic travel yarns, and animal attack stories, pinup photos, and eye-grabbing cover and interior artwork.   The most recently published collection is titled  Atomic Werewolves and Man-Eating Plants.  

1. How and when did you get hooked on history?

I’ve been a history buff since the 1950s, when I was a kid growing up in Dayton, Ohio, I

loved TV shows and movies that were set in the past; everything from Westerns and

Walt Disney’s Davy Crockett series to sword-and-sandal movies set in ancient Greece

and Rome. After I learned to read, I started reading history books and historical novels

geared toward young readers. As a teen I was a huge fan of Civil War history, which

was big then because of the Civil War Centennial, which led me to read things like

Bruce Catton’s Civil War trilogy. I also loved American Heritage magazine and National

Geographic. In college at Ohio State University, I majored in anthropology and was

especially interested in American Indian history and culture. My interest in history has

continued since then.

2. What role does history play or has it played in your personal life?

After college, I moved to Maine, where I spent the first part of my career as an adult

working for the Maine state government. On the side, I started writing articles about

Maine history, wildlife and environmental issues for magazines like DownEast and

Yankee. My writing skills later got me various types of jobs as a copywriter, leading to a

long a four-decade career writing print materials, TV ads, and other things for national

firm that manages ballot measure campaigns. About 20 years ago, I read a couple of

books about vintage men’s adventure magazines published in the 1950s, 1960s and

1970s. I started collecting those mags—called MAMS, for short—and fell in love with

the stories and artwork. Over time, I put together what is now one of the world’s largest

collections of MAMs, maybe the largest. Around 2012, I started writing a blog about

them (MensPulpMags.com). That soon led me to start co-editing books and a magazine

that focus on reprinting MAM stories and art. Some of my books have a lot to do with

history, such as the book A Handful of Hell, which collects war and adventure stories

written by Robert F. Dorr, who started out writing for men’s adventure magazines, then

became one of America’s top military aviation historians.

3. How does history play a part of your professional life/career?

It didn’t play much of a role in my primary adult career as a campaign consultant and

writer. However, it did play a role in the freelance magazine articles I wrote. And,

nowadays it plays a role in the projects I developed with fellow MAM fans I met as a

result of my blog. One of them, Wyatt Doyle, heads up the New Texture indie publishing

company. Starting in 2013, he and I launched a series of books reprinting stories and

artwork from MAMs, called the Men’s Adventure Library series. In those books, we write

introductions about the writers, artists and historical events related to the stories and

artwork. Many of them involve historical events, so we often research and write about

how much fact or fiction there is in the stories. We also do research about MAM writers,

artists and publishing companies. A couple of years ago, I launched a magazine that

reprints MAM stories and artwork with Bill Cunningham, head of the Pulp 2.0 publishing

company. It’s called the Men’s Adventure Quarterly. Like the books I co-edit, I write

intros for the stories we reprint in the MAQ. Nowadays, though I still do some campaign

consulting, I primarily spend my time on my books and magazine publishing projects

and, as a result, have basically become what you might call a pop culture historian.

4. Why is studying/knowing history important?

On a personal level, I think it’s crucial to anyone who really wants to understand what’s

going on in our world today and have an informed perspective that’s based on more

than simplistic prejudices. I’m shocked at how little many people know about history and

how easily that leads to them have opinions that are based more on political

propaganda than facts.

5. What is your favorite period or aspect of history to learn about and why?

As a kid I was especially interested in American history from the 1600s to the early

1900s involving frontiersmen, cowboys and Indians. I still am, though now I read as

much or more about 20th century history, especially World War II, the Korean War, and

the Vietnam War, since they play a role in many of the stories I write introductions for.

6. How did men’s adventure magazines become a part of your life?

When I was a kid and a teenager in the ‘50s and ‘60s, my father read some of the most

popular MAMs, like True and Argosy, but I didn’t pay much attention to them back then

and the genre faded away entirely by 1980. I really got into them because of two books

about them published in mid-2000s, Men's Adventure Magazines: In Postwar America

and It’s A Man's World: Men's Adventure Magazines, The Postwar Pulps. I was blown

away by the artwork, done by some of the greatest illustration artist of the 20th Century.

Artists like Mort Künstler, who later became an illustrator for National Geographic and,

starting in the 1980s, became known as America’s premier Civil War artist. As I

collected the magazines, I found them to be full of a fascinating cornucopia of both

fiction yarns and non-fiction articles that are fun to read both as entertainment and

interesting as windows into American culture in the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s.

7. What do the men’s adventure magazines reveal to us about their era, and what

is their significance in history?

During the decades when they were published, men’s adventure magazines were read

by tens of millions of American men, especially veterans of WWII and the Korean War.

So, they are significant from both sociological and publishing history perspectives. They

are very significant in the realm of illustration art, since they were a primary market for

many illustration artists at a time when mainstream magazines were switching to

photographs rather than artwork for their covers and interior illustrations. They are also

significant in the realm of pulp fiction, since they are descendants of the pulp magazines

that were popular between the early 1900s and World War II and have many

connections to the writers, artists and publishers involved in the paperback industry that

emerged and exploded after WWII. They also have significance in terms of sociological

history. They provide insights into the kinds of stories read by men in the ‘50s, ‘60s and

‘70s and the worldview those men had. Because they are of their time, many aspects of

MAMs now seem sexist, racist, and ethnocentric. But that was true of most mid-20th

century American media and culture. To me, the best reasons to read old MAM stories

are that many of the fiction stories are just plain fun-to-read action/adventure yarns, the

cover and interior artwork is great, and many of the non-fiction articles involve historic

events seen through the prism of that era.

With Wyatt Doyle (left), co-editor