Born in Maine in 1854, Frank Anderson Munsey (185401925) ran a general store, worked as a telegraph operator and then manager of the Western Union's Augusts (Maine) telegraph office before moving to New York City in 1882. Having used his savings to purchase rights to several stories, he managed to edit and produce the first issue of his magazine, Golden Argosy (later The Argosy), in a little over two months of arriving in the city. In 1889 he founded Munsey's Weekly (later Munsey's Magazine). Conceived as 'a magazine of the people and for the people,' it was soon selling 40,000 copies per week.
Other publications included Railroad Man's Magazine, The Ocean, Puritan, Junior Munsey, All-Story Magazine, Scrap Book, Cavalier, and Current Mechanics. Munsey also later became very active in the newspaper industry, at one time or another owning at least 17 different newspapers.
Munsey's success as a publisher is very much the result of his revolutionary idea to print on inexpensive, untrimmed, pulp paper in order to mass-produce affordable (typically ten-cent) magazines, using high-speed printing presses. He also marketed his publications to working-class readers who could not afford and were not interested in the 'slick' magazines of the period, focusing their content on popular fiction genres (notably action and adventure).
The Frank A. Munsey Company was acquired by Popular Publications in 1943.
