Weird Tales stands tall as the original source of the superstars of Fantasy in the decades following the World War I. Robert E. Howard and his Conan stories, H. P. Lovecraft and his Cthulhu Mythos, Clark Ashton Smith, Edmond Hamilton, Henry Kuttner, C. L. Moore and many others who were reprinted in paperback in the 1950s and 60s and 70s and 80s… Despite the keen eye of Farnsworth Wright as editor and the tolerant attitude of J. C. Henneberger as publisher, Weird Tales was never a money maker. In fact, it wasn’t even that big a magazine back in the day. A Pulp monstrosity like Ranch Romances or Horror Stories would outsell Weird Tales every month.
In terms of cultural punch, Weird Tales was a minor leaguer as well, reviled by the Golden Age Science Fiction snobs (who were in turn beneath the notice of most). Weird Tales was a “creepy” book, filled with as much trash as gold. Let’s not forget such pulpsters as G. G. Pendaves, Kirk Mashburn, Arlton Eadie, Bassett Morgan, Frank Owen, Allison Harding, Bruce Wallis and a host of other forgettables were just as prevalent as better writers as E. Hoffman Price, David H. Keller, Paul Ernst, Otis Adelbert Kline, Henry S. Whitehead, Fritz Leiber or Mary Elizabeth Counselman. Not every word that appeared in “The Unique Magazine” was worth preserving in book form.
What really brought this home to me was an interview I saw with Fritz Leiber in which the interviewer was obviously a bronze-ager like myself who spoke of Weird Tales as if it existed in a golden Valhalla in which angels painted by Margaret Brundage danced with nymphs by Boris Dolgov and Hannes Bok. Fritz seemed disgusted by this attitude. He claimed he published his works in Pulps like Weird Tales because that was the only place they could be published. He had no fondness for penny-a-word Pulp obscurity. Weird Tales was no great achievement. He would have preferred The Saturday Evening Post or The New Yorker. But that wasn’t going to happen. Robert A. Heinlein’s “The Green Hills of Earth” appeared in The Saturday Evening Post (February 8, 1947) as did several tales by Ray Bradbury. These were considered exciting breakthroughs for speculative fiction.
I try to imagine this lost world of the 1940s. Weird Tales reigns supreme among my Pulp collection. It was the birthplace of the Cthulhu Mythos. Of Sword & Sorcery. It solidified the ghostbreaker tale as an adventure story. I have no copies of The Saturday Evening Post. Nor do I want any. No Mythos tales, no barbarian fighting shoggothian horrors, no ghost stories or space operas ever appeared in any of them.
I try to focus in on that 1940s way-of-thinking by imaging a similar reality in 2020. And I think of the Internet. Fritz Leiber’s Weird Tales sales were the equivalent today of selling to On-Spec or Heroic Fantasy Quarterly. Nothing against any of these ezines. I picked both because they are good, solid magazines paying under the professional rates of 5 cents a word, much as Weird Tales did in its time. A sale to any of them is a paying concern but not likely to get Hollywood, The New York Times or even Oprah’s Book Club to notice you. The author may reprint the story in a collection down the road but ….
And this finally brings me to the oddest part of this line of thinking. The Internet is the modern equivalent of the Pulps. Cheap, ephemeral and fading away. But unlike all that disintegrating yellow pulp paper, the Internet doesn’t leave much of a paper trail. Will people be able to find obscure website pages in fifty or sixty years? I really doubt it. Many of my earliest web sales are gone. Some others never seem to go away (as much as I would like them to).
And the bottom line here is I should be ecstatic. How many times have I dreamed of living in the ’30s and typing Pulp for a living? If I had a time machine I wouldn’t use it to find next week’s lottery numbers. I would be back in May 1934 buying a pristine copy of Weird Tales with “Queen of the Black Coast” by Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith’s “The Tomb-Spawn” and “Scarlet Dream” by C. L. Moore….
Back in reality-land I am dreading the day, when I am as old as that copy of Weird Tales, my pages flaking and chipping, and some punk kid who just “loves” that old Internet stuff comes to me and gushes about the good old days of the Web. I may just punch him in the face (and since I will be ninety, it will hurt me more.)
On Spec isn’t just an e-zine; they publish physical magazines as well. Just so you know.