On a winter night in 2001 at Manhattan’s storied Algonquin Hotel, friends and business partners Charles Ardai and Max Phillips were parked at the bar. The two were getting pleasantly soused to celebrate the sale of Juno—an early Internet service they’d created—to one of their competitors. As they looked forward to a newfound sense of freedom, discussion turned to what was next in their lives.
“Maybe some literary ghosts were listening and whispering in our ears, since the talk turned to old paperbacks,” says Ardai, who along with Phillips is a passionate fan of the pulp magazines and books once ubiquitous from the 1940s through the 1960s. You know the type—35-cent, pocket-size reads with lurid cover paintings that used to line those wire spinner racks at the local drugstore; lean crime novels that wasted no time in getting straight into the seedy action promised by the sexy artwork.
