Leland Gustavson - Blue Book pulp October 1939

A few years ago, I picked up several interiors from Blue Book Magazine by one of their regular interior artists, Leland Gustavson. Here's one of them -- from the October 1939 issue, for Michael Gallister's "The First Airmail".

Gallister was a pseudonym for H. Bedford-Jones, who wrote so much for Blue Book that he used a few pennames there. I'm not aware of any other pulp doing this, but in the 1930's and 1940's, Blue Book often ran an illustration on the inside front cover. With the better paper stock, those illustrations reproduced better. This was one of them.

Gustavson was born in Chicago, and began his illustration art career there, though he moved to NYC in 1931 and began working for the pulps. While there, he studied with Harvey Dunn. Unlike most original pulp art I've found, Gustavson's pulp illos can be on a variety of different types of paper or, in some cases, a thin window shade material. This is on a pebbled blue-gray illustration paper.