Pulp Fiction

What is the book that Vincent (John Travolta) is reading in "Pulp Fiction" (1994)? Which author's works were made into movies such as "After Dark My Sweet," "The Getaway," "The Grifters" and "The Killing?" Does UB own these works?

If you're interested in the answers to these questions, popular literature and film, stories of violence and redemption, nuclear paranoia, or postwar alienation, then check out the University Libraries' George Kelley Paperback and Pulp Fiction Collection Web site http://ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/units/lml/kelley/.

As Quentin Tarantino reminded us, pulp is "a magazine or book containing lurid subject matter characteristically printed on rough, unfinished paper." The Kelley collection consists of more than 25,000 pulp-fiction books and magazines from the 1940s to the present. Kelley, an alumnus of UB, donated the collection to Lockwood Library in 1994. To find Kelley-collection material in the library catalog, look by author, title, subject or by the keywords "kelley" and genre heading-for example, "kelley and detective and mystery stories." Material from the Kelley collection may be used at Lockwood Library only.

The Kelley Web site contains an extensive list of resources about pulp fiction. The homepage includes links to an annotated bibliography of print reference sources and-under "Internet Links"-an annotated list of links to literature metasites, popular literature and pulp-fiction sites, and other special collections of pulp fiction and magazines. The "Collections" link on the Kelley homepage provides links to many more print and online resources concerned with the various genres that comprise the Kelley collection, including adventure, detective, erotic, fantastic, horror, legal, science fiction, war and western tales. From the collections page, click on the genre you are most interested in to find annotated lists of specialized Internet sites, bibliographies, biographies and encyclopedias and handbooks.

Lockwood Library recently received a grant from the United University Professions Technology Grants program to create a database providing extensive, critical subject access to the detective and mystery fiction in the Kelley collection. Library staff will be looking for volunteer abstractors/indexers among faculty, staff and students. Anyone interested in being part of this initiative should contact Austin Booth at habooth@acsu.buffalo.edu.

For assistance in connecting to the World Wide Web, contact the CIT Help Desk at 645-3542.

-Austin Booth and Nina Cascio,
University Libraries