The Spicy line of pulp magazines was launched in the mid-1930s by Harry Donenfeld’s Culture Publications, a company that specialized in pushing the boundaries of what pulps could get away with under the law. These titles included Spicy Detective Stories, Spicy Mystery Stories, Spicy Adventure Stories, and Spicy Western Stories. On the surface, they were part of the usual pulp genres—crime, horror, adventure, and westerns—but what set them apart was their heavy emphasis on risqué content. The stories featured scantily clad women, salacious situations, and often a blend of sex and violence that shocked critics but attracted a steady audience. Covers were particularly notorious, usually depicting women in peril with lurid, suggestive artwork designed to make the magazines leap off the newsstand. The Spicy magazines gained notoriety for skating just under the line of obscenity laws, becoming some of the most controversial pulps of their time. While they weren’t pornographic by modern standards, their mix of titillation and pulp thrills was provocative enough to draw the ire of moral reformers and eventually the U.S. Post Office, which cracked down on their distribution. By the early 1940s, the titles were forced to tone down their content, dropping “Spicy” from their names and shifting toward tamer fare. Despite their decline, the Spicy line left an enduring mark on pulp history, remembered as both a daring publishing experiment and a key moment in the ongoing tug-of-war between popular entertainment and censorship in America.