H.P. Lovecraft is often touted as one of the Big Three of Weird Tales, along with Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith. He was so well-liked by J.C. Henneberger that he was offered the job as editor of the magazine in 1924. But, despite this affection for Lovecraft and his fiction, HPL received no covers in his 21-year association with WT (“Dagon” (October 1923) to “The Survivor” (July 1954), unless he was ghosting for someone else such as the May 1924 issue which featured “Imprisoned With the Pharaohs” by Harry Houdini. You can make a case for September 1952, which opens with HPL’s poem “Halloween in a Suburb,” with its Virgil Finlay painting of ghostly shapes, but it has little to do with the poem. More typical is January 1942, which features “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” in big letters, but the cover art shows a woman looking at a ring while a sinister Arab lurks behind her. Certainly not HPL’s fish-frogs. (I like to imagine what A.R. Tilbourne or Lee Brown Coye would have produced for that Innsmouth cover.) So, how did this lack of cover assignments affect Lovecraft success?
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