Yesterday was Weird Tales Day. The one hundredth anniversary of the first issue of Weird Tales hitting the newsstands. The first Pulp magazine dedicated to Horror, Science Fiction and the unusual. It predated Amazing Stories by three years. It launched the careers of seminal writers including H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, August Derleth, Robert Bloch and so many others. Weird Tales was never a commercial runaway but was the epicenter from which American SF/F/H explodes. Without Weird Tales you don’t have the Cthulhu Mythos, Sword & Sorcery, Jules de Grandin and many other waves that flow from the 1920s.
Why Weird Tales?
The magazine’s policy was what made it special, giving it the nickname, “The Unique Magazine”. Otis Adelbert Kline was in that first issue and he later acted as associate editor. He wrote “Why Weird Tales?” (May/June/July 1924) which explained why: “Had Edgar Allan Poe produced that masterpiece [“The Murders in the Rue Morgue”] in this generation he would have searched in vain for a publisher before the advent of this magazine.”
The types of stories we have published, and will continue to publish may be placed under two classifications. The first of these is the story of psychic phenomena or the occult story. These stories are written from three viewpoints: The viewpoint of the spiritualist who believes that such phenomena are produced by spirits of the departed, the scientist, who believes they are either the result of fraud, or may be explained by known, little known, or perhaps unknown phases of natural law, and the neutral investigator, who simply records the facts, lets them speak for themselves, and holds no brief for either side.
The second classification might be termed “Highly Imaginative Stories.” These are stories of advancement in the sciences and the arts to which the generation of the writer who creates them has not attained. All writers of such stories are prophets, and in the years to come, many of their prophecies will come true.
In two strokes, Kline has marked off Horror and Science Fiction. Fantasy as a sub-genre will follow with the first Sword & Sorcery tale coming in August 1929, “The Shadow Kingdom” by Robert E. Howard.
Edwin Baird
The editor was Edwin Baird, who would last until the 1924 triple month issue in which that editorial appeared. He was replaced by Farnsworth Wright, who ran the magazine through its best years. Dorothy McIlwraith would take over around 1940 and would give new writers like Ray Bradbury a home. Baird preferred Mystery fiction to Horror and may not have been the best suited for the new venture. To his credit, he did discover and promote H. P. Lovecraft, who was offered the editor’s job but turned it down.
Now let’s take a quick peek at that first issue, dated March 1923. There are a few things you may notice aren’t in the magazine yet, including interior artwork. “The Eyrie” letter column, a vital part of WT’s success, has yet to be created. There are no reprints from Horror’s back catalogue yet.
Volume 1 Issue 1
“The Dead Man’s Tale” by Willard E. Hawkins
“Ooze” by Anthony M. Rud (For more on this story, go here.)
“The Thing of a Thousand Shapes” (Part 1 of 2) by Otis Adelbert Kline
“The Mystery of Black Jean” by Julian Kilman
“The Grave” by Orville R. Emerson
“Hark! The Rattle!” by Joel Townsley Rogers
“The Ghost Guard” by Bryan Irvine
“The Ghoul and the Corpse” by G. A. Wells (For more on this story, go here.)
“Fear “ by David R. Solomon
“The Chain” by Hamilton Craigie
“The Place of Madness” by Merlin Moore Taylor
“The Closing Hand” by Farnsworth Wright
“The Unknown Beast “ by Howard Ellis Davis
“The Basket” by Herbert J. Mangham
“The Accusing Voice” by Meredith Davis
“The Sequel” by Walter Scott Story – a sequel to “A Cask of Amontillado” by Poe
“The Weaving Shadows” by W. H. Holmes
“Nimba, the Cave Girl” by R. T. M. Scott
“The Young Man Who Wanted to Die” by ? ? ?
“The Scarlet Night” by William Sanford
“The Extraordinary Experiment of Dr. Calgroni” by Joseph Faus and James Bennett Wooding
“The Return of Paul Slavsky” by Capt. George Warburton Lewis
“The House of Death” by F. Georgia Stroup
“The Gallows” by I. W. D. Peters
“The Skull” by Harold Ward
“The Ape-Man” by J. B. M. Clarke, Jr.
Some Thoughts
- The familiar names of future issues include Otis Adelbert Kline and Harold Ward. The rest are not going to become regulars. Hamilton Craigie and Julian Kilman will have a few stories and Farnsworth Wright will become editor.
- Names famous outside of Weird Tales including Anthony Rud who will write a few stories but mostly was an editor for Western magazines. Willard E. Hawkins wrote SF for other Pulp publishers. Hamilton Craigie, Joel Townsley Rogers and R. T. M. Scott wrote for other Pulps and had careers away from Horror and Science Fiction.
- The length of stories was generally quite short therefore there were more tales than later issues carried.
- Three of them involve apes or cavemen.
This issue may seem old-fashioned and unimpressive but at least two stories had a huge influence on later tropes. “Ooze” set the pattern for slime monsters in the Pulps and later in the comics. “The Ghoul and the Corpse” may have been the first frozen caveman story, again popular in the Pulps and in the comics. Much of what is here is not that impressive but it was the first. Names like H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, C. L. Moore are all in the future, including that most prolific of all Weird Tales writers, Seabury Quinn.
I think it is important to point out that though Weird Tales is so important to American fantastic fiction, it was not a great market for a writer. It paid on publication, which meant writers had to wait until stories appeared before they received a check. Farnsworth Wright often paid slowly or in portions as cash flow allowed. Weird Tales also bought all rights, so when stories were reprinted in anthologies like Not at Night or on the failed Weird Tales Radio show, they received no money. The passing of ten decades can make Weird Tales publication look far more glamorous than it actually was. Fritz Leiber was known to take interviewers to task over this nostalgic idea.
Classic Themes
If you’d like to see important themes from future issues, here is a list:
Conclusion
Weird Tales’ legacy is well earned. Not everyone liked the type of stories found there. Some Science Fiction snobs (Isaac Asimov was one) called them down. Wilson Tucker, as a young fan, mocked the magazine. Despite the detractors, Weird Tales was an important market for early Science Fiction writers like Edmond Hamilton, Nictzin Dyalhis and J. Schlossel. It also inspired many magazines that followed like Fantasy Tales.
To this day there has been at least five attempts to revive the magazine. In 1973, Leo Marguiles and Sam Moskowitz produced the California Issues. In 1981, Lin Carter tried it in paperback format. In 1984, Gordon M. D. Garb tried. In 1988, George Scithers, John Betancourt and Darrell Schweitzer tried. After that it gets hard to tell, but the latest attempt is by Horror novelist, Jonathan Mayberry. It is an honorable and desirable thing to do. I tried myself with Dark Worlds back in 2008. The love of dark and fantastical stories will never go away. Weird Tales has earned the new nickname that Marvin Kaye gave it in 1988, The Magazine That Never Dies.
Great retrospective, very informative.
Many thanks for this feature! I’m not sure if I’ve ever actually seen an issue of Weird Tales, although I’ve no doubt read many stories in various anthologies that were originally published there.
Marvin Kaye’s lengthy anthology of stories from Weird Tales, The Magazine That Never Dies, is worth checking out, if anyone can find a copy. There is also a shorter anthology by Mike Ashley, Weird Legacies (1977).
However, I don’t think Asimov’s dislike of Weird Tales made him a “science fiction snob.” It might simply have been a matter of personal taste. Asimov liked the short-lived fantasy magazine Unknown edited by John W. Campbell.
I think Asimov disliked weird fiction. He was an SF author through and through. He dud appear in the magazine along with Fred Pohl but that was towards the end when Dorothy McIlwraith was using some weaker SF from Nelson Bond and Frank Belknap Long.
Asimov probably did dislike weird fiction of the sort that appeared in Weird Tales. He once wrote that he found Lovecraft’s style revolting. Nevertheless, I don’t think he was a “science fiction snob” in the sense of disliking fantasy per se. He loved Lord of the Rings and the more rationalistic fantasy that appeared in the magazine Unknown.