The Weird Tales Reprint Story

The Reprint

The Weird Tales Reprint story was a controversial part of the Unique Magazine’s history. Reprints in Pulp magazines were not uncommon. Hugo Gernsback survived his first years of Amazing Stories using Verne, Wells and Edgar Rice Burroughs reprints. In this way, he also taught a whole new crop of writers what Science Fiction was. Farnsworth Wright did not have the same problem. Ghost stories and horror tales had been around for centuries. Wright used it as a way to save money, by using public domain or cheap cost reprints. He might have inadvertently given some readers an education in the classics, but the move was purely financial.

While some liked having access to the old stories, other readers said the pages of the reprints were wasted. Fans like Henry Kuttner (who later became an author) campaigned hard for the reprint being taken from previous issues of the magazine rather than old material from England or France. Kuttner wanted to see the H. P. Lovecraft stories from the early Edwin Baird days of the Weird Tales. From 1925 to 1928 Wright chose only classics of fantasy & horror from the back-list of the classics.

Anthologies To Choose From

His choices are quite illuminating in that he did not have a dozen anthologies to sift through as we would today. The big boom in horror anthologies began in the 1920s with the Not At Night series by Christine Campbell Thomson. And the contents of her books were largely taken from Weird Tales’ stable of authors! She knew Farnworth Wright’s tastes were excellent.

Some anthologies he might have used include Great Ghost Stories by Joseph Lewis French (1918) – three stories are similar; Humorous Ghost Stories by Dorothy Scarborough (1921) – 3 stories; Ghosts and Marvels: A Selection of Uncanny Tales from Daniel Defoe to Algernon Blackwood (1924) by V. H. Collins – five stories. The entries in these collections are often the same ones. The majority of Farnsworth’s selections would more likely have come from collected stories of the authors.

The reprint story did not get an illustration but bore the standard topper drawn by Hugh Rankin. (Later, when Dorothy McIlwraith re-used stories the tale might get a new image.)

1925

“The Three Low Masses” by Alphonse Daudet (Weird Tales, July 1925)

“Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment” by Nathaniel Hawthorne (Weird Tales, August 1925)

“The Furnished Room” by O. Henry (Weird Tales, September 1925)

“The Severed Hand” by William Hauff (Weird Tales, October 1925)

“The Young King” by Oscar Wilde (Weird Tales, November 1925)

“What Was It? A Mystery” by Fitz-James O’Brien (Weird Tales, December 1925)

1926

“Wandering Willie’s Tale” by Sir Walter Scott (Weird Tales, January 1926)

“The White Dog” by Feodor Sologub (Weird Tales, February 1926)

“The Mask of Red Death” by Edgar Allan Poe (Weird Tales, March 1926)

“The Mummy’s Foot” by Theophile Gautier (Weird Tales, April 1926)

“The Werewolf” by H. B. Marryat (Weird Tales, May 1926)

“The Upper Berth” by F. Marion Crawford (Weird Tales, June 1926)

“The Birthmark” by Nathaniel Hawthorne (Weird Tales, July 1926)

“The Horla” by Guy de Maupassant (Weird Tales, August 1926)

“The Tapestried Chamber” by Sir Walter Scott (Weird Tales, September 1926)

“The Bagman’s Sory” by Charles Dickens (Weird Tales, October 1926)

“Ligeia” by Edgar Allan Poe (Weird Tales, November 1926)

“The Apparition of Mrs. Veal” by Daniel De Foe (Weird Tales, December 1926)

1927

“The Dream Woman” by Wilkie Collins (Weird Tales, January 1927)

“The Lady of the Velvet Collar” by Washington Irving (Weird Tales, February 1927)

“Lazarus” by Leonid Andreyeff (Weird Tales, March 1927)

“Markheim” by Robert Louis Stevenson (Weird Tales, April 1927)

“Young Goodman Brown” by Nathaniel Hawthorne (Weird Tales, May 1927)

“The Song of Triumphant Love” by Ivan Turgenieff (Weird Tales, June 1927)

“The Dragon Fang” by Fitz-James O’Brien (Weird Tales, July 1927)

“The Queen of Spades” by Alexander Pushkin (Weird Tales, August 1927)

“Lord of the Jackals” by Sax Rohmer (Weird Tales, September 1927)

“The Old Nurse’s Story” by Elizabeth C. Gaskell (Weird Tales, October 1927)

“The Thousand and Second Tale” by Edgar Allan Poe (Weird Tales, November 1927)

“Dracula’s Guest” by Bram Stoker (Weird Tales, December 1927)

1928

“Metzengerstein” by Edgar Allan Poe (Weird Tales, January 1928)

“Clarimonde” by Theophile Gautier (Weird Tales, February 1928)

“The Legend of the Moor’s Legacy” by Washington Irving (Weird Tales, March 1928)

“The Legend of St. Julian” by Gustave Flaubert (Weird Tales, April 1928)

“Rappaccini’s Daughter” by Nathaniel Hawthorne (Weird Tales, May 1928)

“The Specter Bridegroom” by Washington Irving (Weird Tales, June 1928)

“The Bowmen” by Arthur Machen (Weird Tales, July 1928)

“The Demoiselle D’Ys” by Robert W. Chambers (Weird Tales, August 1928)

“The Burial of the Rats” by Bram Stoker (Weird Tales, September 1928)

“The Specter of Tappington” by Richard Harris Barham (Weird Tales, October 1928)

“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” by Washington Irving (Weird Tales, November 1928)

“The Monster-Maker” by W. C. Morrow (Weird Tales, December 1928)

The Change

January 1929 saw the first in-house reprint: “When the Green Star Waned” by Nictzin Dyalhis from April 1925. From this time on reprints could be classic material or stories that once appeared in the magazine. Wright usually alternated month-to-month. Later in 1930s he would serialize whole novels such as Alexander Dumas The Wolf Leader (1857) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). This last choice drew much ire from the readers as it was easily found. The novel took up almost a year’s number of issues. Readers felt a short story that took up one issue was bearable but to waste nine issues in a row was unforgivable. Wright had meant to follow up Frankenstein with Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897) but dropped it.

New Editors

In 1940, when Dorothy McIlwraith took over from Wright, she dropped the reprint. There were a number of reasons for this, the biggest being that Weird Tales went from monthly to bi-monthly. Appearing only six times a year there was no need for the extra material. The last reprint was in December 1939’s issue. It was “The Copper Bowl” by Major George Fielding Elliott from Weird Tales, December 1928. The last “classic” reprint was “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe, August 1939. McIlwraith would bring back reprints in the magazine’s final days as new material was hard to find for cheap. She only re-used previous WT stories like “The Sin Eater” by G. G. Pendarves, but made no indication it was an old story other than a copyright statement at the bottom.

Lin Carter

When Lin Carter revived Weird Tales as a paperback anthology in 1981 he used the Weird Tales Reprint Story to pepper his four volumes. (Leo Marguiles had used reprints in the 1970s “California Issues” but didn’t label them as such. To do so would have been ridiculous since the contents were mostly reprints.) Carter’s choices were “Bats’ Belfry” by August Derleth, “The Feast in the Abbey” by Robert Bloch, “The Sapphire Siren” by Nictzin Dyalhis, “The Red Brain” by Donald Wandrei, “The Wind That Tramped the World” by Frank Owen, “The City of Dread” by Lloyd Arthur Eshbach and “Ooze” by Anthony M. Rud. All of these were stories that originally appeared in Weird Tales.

Marvin Kaye

It would be Marvin Kaye in Weird Tales: The Magazine That Never Dies (1988) that would use many more classic reprints including “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” by Lucian, “The Terror From the Water-Tank” by William Hope Hodgson, “”The Woman With the Velvet Collar” by Gaston Leroux, “The Judge’s House” by Bram Stoker, “The Lost Club” by Arthur Machen, “The Haunted Burglar” by W. C. Morrow, “Never Bet the Devil Your Head” by Edgar Allan Poe, “A Child’s Dream of a Star” by Charles Dickens, “The Legend of St. Julian” by Gustave Flaubert. Kaye said of his selections, some of which came from the Marguiles issues:

In some cases, I have chosen material a bit more “pulpish” than my taste normally would dictate. Weird Tales, after all, was a pulp magazine and had its share of second-rate filler . . . though sometimes this latter category holds pleasant surprises for patient readers.

I always felt Kaye erred in including so much reprint material. That’s a lot of room that could have been used for Jules De Grandin, John Thunstone, etc., etc. This is a classic Weird Tales reader response. Just like those readers of 1928 I feel like the editor wasted the space. I guess Marvin Kaye really did capture that old Weird Tales feeling!