A. Merritt's Fantasy Magazine - Dark Worlds Quarterly

Getting your name on a magazine is a kudo few writers get. When you say Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine you know EQ was something back in the day. Louis L’Amour, Zane Grey, Mary Higgins Clark, Alfred Hitchcock and Isaac Asimov all can claim this honor. One other author who was so important to American Fantasy he also got his own mag was Abraham Merritt (1884-1943). A. Merritt’s Fantasy Magazine ran for five issues from December 1949 to October 1950.

A. Merritt

Merritt’s reputation as a writer of Fantasy was based on a series of stories and novels from 1917 to 1948, beginning with the instant classic “Through the Dragon Glass” to posthumous collaborations with Hannes Bok like “The Fox Woman”/“The Blue Pagoda” (1946) and The Black Wheel (1948). His tales, published in the weeklies like Argosy and All-Story were not many (compared with writers like Edgar Rice Burroughs or Zane Grey) for he wrote in his spare time while working as an editor at The American Weekly. He influenced the next generation of writers such as H. P. Lovecraft, C. L. Moore and Richard Shaver. In 1938 readers of Argosy voted him their favorite writer of all-time. Two of his novels were filmed by Hollywood.

Lionel Barrymore in Devil-Doll (1936)

The magazine that bore his name was a third attempt to capitalize on his fame, the first was Famous Fantastic Mysteries (1939-1953) and the second, Fantastic Novels (1940-1950), both of which used Merritt reprints. Edited by Mary Gnaedinger, with covers by Norman Saunders and Peter Stevens, the magazine revived Merritt’s best works as well as other reprints that showed a similar love of the fantastic. Interiors illustrations were done by Virgil Finlay and a number of Finlay knock-offs. Only the decline and final extinction of the Pulps ended Merritt’s magazine along with the rest of the Munsey line.

Issue 1 (December 1949)