Manhunt Year 1953 Magazine Back Issues

Manhunt boasted it was the world's best-selling crime fiction magazine, and was certainly the "gold standard" against which all other "tough" crime magazines of the period measured themselves. Starting in January 1953 as a monthly digest, it flirted briefly (from March 1957 to May 1958) with a larger format to enhance newsstand sales. The latter was not a success however and it soon reverted to digest size and dropped to bimonthly. In all it ran for almost 15 years and notched up a very respectable 114 issues. From January 1953 to March 1956 the cover read Manhunt Detective Story Monthly, but the magazine was always called just Manhunt in the table of contents. One notable feature of the magazine was the number of reprints it spawned. As well as a local reprint called Giant Manhunt which rebound 3-4 unsold issues of the magazine into a bumper issue, there were also at least two reprint series in the UK (one as Bloodhound Detective Story Magazine) as well as three reprint series in Australia (one as Manhunt Detective Story Magazine, one as Phantom Suspense-Mystery Magazine, and another as Verdict Detective Story Magazine).