The fifth issue of Weird Tales was cover-dated July-August 1923, meaning for practical purposes that the magazine had skipped publishing in the month of July. With the skipped month the first volume of Weird Tales came to an end after four issues; the fifth issue began Volume 2, which would last for four months. Then the magazine skipped the month of December, and the January 1924 issue began Volume 3, which would run for another four issues. Things got a little confusing at that point, as we will eventually see.

The second volume doesn’t have any major differences in format from the first, which is to say the July-August issue physically resembles the June one. It’s the same size, with the same logo. The cover illustration’s black-and-white instead of colour, but is a definite step up in craftsmanship. The image is signed ‘Mally’ above the initials ‘RLM’ in a circle, and is likely the work of George William Mally, perhaps in collaboration with his wife Ruth Lena Mikelson Mally. It’s solid draughtsmanship and looks reasonably dramatic, though it’s unclear what story it’s meant to be illustrating.

There are 10 interior drawings, apparently all from veteran Weird Tales illustrator William F. Heitman, along with some decorative tailpieces at the ends of stories. Heitman tries more dramatic compositions here than in previous issues, and experiments with shading and atmospheric effects. He still focuses on character, which is normally a good idea but in the case of this specific magazine may miss a key part of the title’s appeal. On the other hand, the first illustration, for Francis Stevens’ “Sunfire,” completely fails to capture the monster the story describes — Stevens writes of a gigantic caterpillar, and Heitman gives us what frankly looks like a human being in a mask and costume. Weirdness does not appear to have been Heitman’s strong suit.

The text layout’s much the same as the previous issue. One story, “People Vs Bland,” by Theodore Snow Wood, has its last few paragraphs in a smaller font, presumably to keep the ending of the story from sprawling onto another page. There’s no fiction reprint this time out. But like last issue, there’s a two-page bylined non-fiction article (slightly more than two pages, in fact) along with the brief unsigned non-fiction pieces at the ends of some of the stories. There is also something new in this issue: poetry. Two brief poems by Clark Ashton Smith appear alongside some of the nonfiction snippets, thus making Smith the first of the ‘big three’ Weird Tales writers (Smith, Lovecraft, and Robert E. Howard) to appear in the magazine.

Before getting to the nonfiction and poetry, though, let’s take a quick look at the ads in this issue. As with last issue, there aren’t too many of them. The back cover’s one of the now-familiar ads for a fingerprinting course, but there aren’t any full-page ads in the magazine itself (possibly excepting on the inside covers, not preserved in the PDF I’m working with). And the ads that the magazine does run are all in the last five pages.

The U.S. School of Music has the first and one of the bigger ads in the issue, for a correspondence course teaching a musical instrument (key sales pitch: “Don’t Be a Wall Flower”). Then an ad for an astrological reading (“ASTROLOGY, the most ancient and interesting science of history!”). An ad for a gold watch and for “agents” to sell gold watches. An ad for a handgun, an ad for a diamond ring, an ad for an educational book about sex; the latter ad’s headlined “SEX” in big letters, states the book “goes direct to the heart of the sex question,” and promises it “Creates a new kind of married love.”

The next page has three small ads at the top: for a fake diamond ring; a three-foot-telescope; and a treatment for breaking tobacco addiction. Then a large ad, promising up to $200 a week for anyone who becomes a salesmen for Comer All-Weather Coats. The next page has ads for tires, more fake diamond rings, “Wilson Common Sense Ear Drums” (artificial ear drums to cure deafness, described by researchers today as of “limited value” but widely advertised in the early 20th century until the creation of the FDA), and a cure for pimples.

The next page has another ad for tires, a small text-only ad promising to cure epileptic fits, then in another column on the same page an ad looking for salesmen of wool suits (promising “live-wire hustlers” that “if you put in your best licks, we do the rest for you”), another tire ad, an ad in the style of a fake news article promising a treatment for “rupture” (apparently meaning hernias), and another ad for a gold wristwatch. The last page has an ad for Kimberlite rings (apparently not kimberlite the mineral, but a brand name for a fake diamond ring, claiming to be “a real man’s ring!”), another tire ad, and then a very large ad for a product to eliminate fat. There was at the time a weight-loss craze; a chemical analysis shows that the formula for the substance being advertised (Dr R.L. Graham’s “neutroids”) “contained iodol, magnesium carbonate, starch, talc and a trace of iron.”

The ads can tell you a lot about the year 1923. The ring ads speak to trends in men’s fashion; the numerous tire ads show how quickly the automobile’s being adopted; the patent medicine ads show what people are suffering from, how desperate they are for relief, and how readily some people, even people with real medical credentials, prey upon that desperation. But with all that said, there’s still not much that I can see aimed specifically at an identifiable Weird Tales audience, and not much that speaks to the distinct identity of the magazine. By contrast, I looked randomly at an issue from mid-1928 (June 1928, to be precise) and found a number of ads for things like an “encyclopedia of curious secrets,” for “the Brotherhood of Light,” and for a “New Secret Book” that “Reveals Rosicrucian Laws and Secret Teachings.” This isn’t necessarily any more honest or ethical than the ads this issue, but does feel like a better tonal fit for the magazine.

Moving to the nonfiction, let’s start with the two-page bylined article. Introduced in an editorial blurb as “A Special Article About a Weird Cult,” it’s written by Will W. Nelson and titled “Voodooism.” I can find very little about Nelson; mainly, thanks to the FictionMags bibliographies I see he has a letter in the December, 1933, issue of Weird Tales where he praises a Jack Williamson story “mostly because I have dreamed, and silly as it may seem, longed to be the last person on earth with one or two companions, boys.”

There are three basic problems with Nelson’s article. First, it’s wildly racist. Second, it’s poorly written; the first sentence, for example, clunkily repeats the use of the word “savage” (see also point one). Thirdly, it’s inaccurate. To expand on that last point a bit: I’m not expecting the precision of academic history from an issue of Weird Tales in the 1920s, but the precision of a halfway decent encyclopedia shouldn’t have been out of reach. I am not going to claim to be an expert in Voodoo myself, but I have never seen anyone claiming, as Nelson does, that Voodoo was brought from Africa wholesale and unchanged. Nor have I ever seen anyone seriously claim that it is “not a religion, but a form of sorcery.”

The article describes a visit Nelson claims to have made to a “voodoo king” in Mobile, Alabama, followed by an imagined description of a nighttime Voodoo ceremony at the edge of a deep swamp, which is then followed by a surprisingly sober description of the career of far-famed New Orleans Voodoo practitioner Marie Laveau. The description of the voodoo king presents him as a literal subhuman, a creature built of racist tropes; Laveau is described as a clever fraud and con-artist. There are moments of straightforward description here, mainly in the depiction of the ceremony, but also such clear bias it’s difficult to know what to really make of what Nelson describes.

You can see how the idea of the article might have seemed to make sense in the context of Weird Tales to editor Edwin Baird in 1923. It’s no compliment to a religion to describe it as ‘weird,’ but then Nelson is mostly interested in the practical magic he sees as part of Voodoo, along with the accompanying imagery and ritual. So the piece tries to evoke an atmosphere through description, and the presentation of esoteric history. Unfortunately, not only is the writing stilted enough that the atmosphere doesn’t come off, the basic approach is so deeply marred by racism down to its conception and structure that the article is an utter failure, and an embarrassment to the magazine.

There are 16 headlined short non-fiction pieces filling up page space at the ends of stories, plus two more even briefer pieces without headlines. The first non-fiction piece comes after the fourth story, still only on page 22: “British-American Exploring Party Discovers Ancient Temple of Moon God.” It’s a brief article about the excavation of the temple of the Mesopotamian moon god Sin, or Nanna (here printed as “Nanner”), in the Ziggurat of Ur. An expedition led by Leonard Woolley was excavating Ur; they’d work in the ruins of the city until 1934. (Incidentally, in 1930 Woolley would become friends with Agatha Christie, and invite her to the dig site, where she’d meet her second husband, Max Mallowan, and gather material that would eventually result in the Poirot novel Murder in Mesopotamia.) Woolley’s expedition seems to have been well-covered by the press in 1923; here’s an article from the April 1 issue of the Washington Times.

Two pieces follow the next tale. The first and much longer piece tells us of “A Weird Prophetic Dream and Its Gruesome Fulfillment.” It’s a reprint of an account of a dream from the journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, along with a newspaper account that recounts a suicide allegedly symbolically predicted by the dream. The dream was one of four printed in the journal by Dr. Walter F. Prince, one of the founders of the ASPR and at the time its Principal Research Officer. Prince was relatively credulous abut psychic phenomena, and I have to say that the dream and newspaper article don’t seem to have much to do with each other (but remember Prince’s name; he’ll come back into this post later on).

Below that piece is is one headlined “Savages Burn Man Alive To Appease ‘Goddess.’” One notes again the use of the derogatory term in the headline, regrettably common in the period, but the story appears mostly accurate. It states that somewhere in southern Rhodesia the son of a tribal chief was burned alive because he’d assaulted a woman believed to be a rain goddess, and thus caused a major drought; after the execution, rain fell. An article from a South African newspaper states that the chief was behind the murder of his son, though a 1983 PhD thesis mentioning the incident doesn’t include this point while having a more detailed grasp of the mythological background.

Two stories later, we find seven one-paragraph pieces and a poem. I’ll talk about the poetry later, so let’s dive into the weird facts. The first piece claims “American [sic] Has 1,500,000 Dope Fiends.” It cites “narcotic inspectors” who claim that one American in 73 is a drug addict. I note that there was a New York Times article from May 14, 1923, quoting a Dr. Henry Van Dyke as the source of this estimate; Van Dyke apparently wanted to get the League of Nations involved in suppressing opiate traffic, but to the extent he’s remembered nowadays, it’s not as a narcotic inspector. Van Dyke in fact was a clergyman and English professor at Princeton. The US government had claimed in 1919 that there were one million drug addicts in the country, and some anti-drug crusaders had seized on that figure, but by 1923 the government was trying to back away from that claim since it dramatically overstated reality — never mind Van Dyke’s larger number.

Below that piece, “Monte Carlo Casino Yields Huge Annual Profit” notes that despite gamblers’ best efforts, the Monte Carlo Casino took in 65,860170 francs in the 1922-23 season. I don’t know where the number cane from, but it sounds about right; one source I found says that the 1921-22 season brought the casino over 58 million francs. Then “Girl Afflicted With Strange Malady” describes the case of a girl from Danville, Illinois, who believed that her fading health could be improved by taking large quantities of tobacco. The piece says she had been taken to the State Hospital for the Insane at Kankakee; I can’t find anything about any of this online.

The next piece, at the top of the second column of articles, claims “Woman Weds Twins; Can’t Tell Them Apart.” According to the story, Marie Telder of Innsbruck, Austria, went to court because she believed that after marrying a man she had actually been living with her husband’s twin brother, whom she could not distinguish from her legal spouse. There’s no further elaboration, and again I can’t find any more information about it.

The next piece says “Caterpillar Army Halts Train,” telling us that caterpillars in Oregon massed so thickly on train tracks as to delay a train by more than an hour, as well as driving a nearby resident from his house. The article repeats facts from a June 8 article in the New York Times, including the framing of the assemblage of caterpillars as an “army.” The next piece, “Man Is Tried for Thirty-three Murders,” is about the trial of Russian serial killer Vasili Komaroff, who confessed to thirty-three murders, some in collaboration with his wife. He was executed on June 18, though that’s not mentioned here; it is accurately noted that the great interest Komaroff’s trial provoked led to it being held in the Polytechnic Museum. (The trial incidentally, was covered by a newspaper writer named Mikhail Bulgakov, who would go on to quite a career.)

The final piece on this page is headlined “Author Sues ‘Egyptian Spook’” and tells us that a “famous medium of Bucharest” named “Mimi Stefanesco” has been sued for a million francs by “Maurice Dewaleffe, French author,” who claims she is an imposter who has libelled him, a claim involving a fiction Dewaleffe published about Egypt and the medium’s claim to communicate with ancient Egyptians. This sounds confused, and understandably so. What the magazine describes isn’t quite what went on. What actually happened is moderately complex, if interesting (at least to me).

In 1916 a Romanian banker named Stefanescu held a seance, with “a cousin of the former Minister of Commerce of R[o]mania” as the medium. The medium invoked a dead Romanian author who in turn claimed to have been the reincarnation of an Egyptian priest named Ramiskon from 1500 BCE. ‘Ramiskon’ then recited a romantic story, which was taken down by a stenographer and later written up as a romance by Stefanescu’s daughter Mimi. The first chapters of this romance were serialised early in 1923, but soon after Mimi Stefanescu came across what she thought was a new book titled La reine Taia [Queen Taia] by Maurice de Waleffe. Stefanescu saw what she thought was a clear plagiarism of her writing and sued; but Taia was only a reprint under another name of de Waleffe’s 1906 novel Le Péplôs vert [Green Peplos]. The priority of de Waleffe’s story established, de Waleffe (who had founded the Miss France beauty contest and would later found the Miss Europe pageant) counter-sued father and daughter Stefanescus for 100,000 francs (not a million) and was ultimately awarded 1000. According to the New York Times, one of the witnesses at the trial was “Aldin Valabregue, President of the Spiritualist Club of Paris, who declared it the most remarkable example of reading at a distance ever known.”

The next article, at the end of the next story (Bryan Irvine’s “Shades”) and immediately preceding “Voodooism,” tells us “Lecturer Derides Material Theories of Evolution.” Dr. Henry van Dyke, whom we have already encountered, is quoted at some length from “a recent address in Chicago.” And he does indeed mock materialism and state that evolution can be reconciled with a divine Creator.

The next piece asks “Will Tombs of Old Mexico Outrival King Tut’s?” It seems to be based on “an address before the Archaeological Society of Washington” given by “Dr. Marshall H. Saville,” and claims archaeological exploration of Mayan tombs “are expected to outrival the trophies and wonders” of the tomb of Tutankhamun. Then, after the next story, there’s the second poem of the issue and an article headlined “Deed 2,230 Years Old Unearthed,” mentioning that Dr. Nathaniel Reich of the University of Pennsylvania has recently translated an ancient Egyptian deed brought from Thebes (you can read a more recent translation here).

Two more nonfiction pieces follow the end of the letters column. “Woman and Girl Fight Bloody Duel” tells of a swordfight between the 60-year-old wife of Dr. Rider Wheelock of Industry, New York, and Wheelock’s 22-year-old nurse Mabel Grant. The piece tells us that “the tongues of busy gossips were set to wagging at both ends” (which sounds painful) by the duel, and that “frequently the papers contain reports of duels fought by two men for the love of a woman, but a similar duel fought by two women for the love of a man is unique in the annals of modern journalism.” One wonders whether that speaks to the value women in 1923 put on their men, or whether the papers were missing a few things. In any case, this duel ended after a half-hour with both women too exhausted to lift their swords, and with both having sustained cuts and lacerations. I can find nothing of this battle on the internet.

Then “Spirit Objects to Holding Hands” describes a moment that happened during a seance with $5000 on the line. Scientific American had offered the money to any medium who could bring about, as Weird Tales puts it, “genuine materialization phenomena.” George Valentine, of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, took the magazine up on its challenge. At a seance with the editors of Scientific American (who happened to include the previously-mentioned Dr. Walter F. Prince), representatives of the New York Times, and the Wilkes-Barre newspaper the Times Leader, Valentine did his best. There happened to be another man present at the seance, though, who’d prepared for him.

Harry Houdini had set up microphones, and rigged Valentine’s chair with electrical contacts setting off lights in a nearby chamber whenever Valentine’s weight left the chair. Since seances at the time didn’t involve holding hands, only sitting in the dark, it was not uncommon for charlatan mediums to get up and move around to create some kind of eerie effect. In this case one of those effects is what’s described in the Weird Tales piece: Valentine, claiming to be a manifested Indigenous American spirit named “Hawk Chief,” waved a tin trumpet around until it got too close to one of the sitters — Scientific American editor J. Malcolm Bird, in Weird Tales’ telling, or Houdini, according to this thorough retrospective write-up from the Times Leader. The sitter spoke or grabbed at the trumpet; either way, the ‘spirit’ shouted and struck out with the trumpet. After the seance, Houdini revealed that his gadgets had tracked Valentine’s movements, and proved him a fraud. (And just to cap things off, note that Houdini, as we’ll see in a few months, would go on to a brief but fairly memorable connection with Weird Tales.)

The last interior page of the magazine has an article telling us “Death Held No Terror for Bernhardt.” The great French actress Sarah Bernhardt had died on March 26, 1923, prompting this piece recounting some of the legends about her. Specifically, the piece claimed she chose as the location of her tomb “a wild spot on Belle Isle — an enormous pile of jagged rocks, reaching high into the air above the Atlantic Ocean and forming a natural monument.” Bernhardt was actually buried in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris. The article also reports that Bernhardt kept a satin-lined coffin in her house, as indeed she did. Whether she slept in it often, as the article claims, is apparently unclear.

That’s followed by two one-paragraph pieces providing simple explanations of science facts. The first tells us tears are salty because the salt keeps the eye from being irritated, and indeed here’s a site that at least looks reliable that says the salt in tears “helps protect your eyes and keep them healthy.” The second one-paragraph piece tells us, also correctly, that aviators don’t see the Earth rotate beneath them because they’re part of the Earth’s inertial frame of reference — the air, including airplanes, rotates with the planet.

There is another section of the magazine that claims to present some nonfiction pieces. That is “The Cauldron,” which presents allegedly true tales of brushes with the supernatural allegedly sent in by readers. This month gives us four such tales.

The first is “The Lesson In Anatomy” from John R. Palmer. According to Palmer, he was so overcome by seeing Rembrandt’s painting “The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp” that he returned at night to the museum holding the painting. There, he had a kind of vision in which he seemed to be inside the painting, and was lifted to the dissecting-table to become the body in Rembrandt’s scene. Allegedly, he was found the next morning under the painting with a cut in his arm. It makes a nice enough tale.

“The Black Nun” is a story contributed by ‘H.F.K.,’ supposedly a woman whose husband, in the days after the Civil War, was given a government job in a Southern city. There, H.F.K. was haunted by the ghost of a black-clad nun. Her mother, a medium, visited and sensed a presence in the place. Finally, a local told her a story that happened during the War in which a woman’s lover went off to war, the woman joined a nursing order of nuns, her former lover was eventually brought to her to be cared for, he died, and she went mad before dying. Again, it makes a well-shaped story.

Charles White gives us “The Phantom Train.” When he was a boy, White tells us, he was visiting his uncle, a station agent on a rural Canadian railroad, when an accident took the life of a bad-tempered engineer who swore as he died that he’d return even from Hell to drive his train. A week later, White and his uncle witnessed a ghost train that appeared to crash off a bridge but actually vanished into thin air. This supposedly was the first of several appearances of the ghost train, appearances which stopped some years before 1923 when the railway line fell into disuse because the bridge wasn’t heavy enough to support modern trains. Again, a decent yarn.

Finally, we get “A Strange Manifestation,” described by Matt Byrne Ap’Rhys. While passing through Cleveland, he lay down for a night’s sleep only to wake to see a woman in the doorway of his room. When he spoke she vanished without a trace. This story’s the simplest and least impressive of the four pieces in this month’s Cauldron, which to my eye makes it the most likely to be an actual recounting of a real experience.

So let us now return to the poetry, and to Clark Ashton Smith, appearing in Weird Tales a month or two before Lovecraft (depending on whether you count a letter-column appearance or not) and almost two years before Robert E. Howard. Smith’s two poems are “The Red Moon,” an eight-line two-quatrain piece in iambic tetrameter rhyming ABBA, and “The Garden of Evil,” a Petrarchan sonnet in iambic pentameter with an intricate rhyme scheme in the sestet. You can read the first here, under Smith’s preferred title of “Moon-Dawn,” and the second here under Smith’s title “Duality.”

I note that while “The Red Moon/Moon-Dawn” appears the same in print as in the online version that is apparently Smith’s preferred text, lines 2, 3, and 10 of “The Garden of Evil/Duality” are different; lines 2 and 3, at least, have a much more regular iambic meter in the online text though the meaning isn’t much different. Smith considered himself a poet first, so this sort of difference would have mattered to him. I don’t know whether the change came from Edwin Baird tinkering with Smith’s text, or whether Smith changed his mind about the wording after seeing it in print.

As for the actual content of the poems, both of them are natural scenes described with a gothic and indeed decadent atmosphere. You can see the influence of Baudelaire. They contrast a material earthly world with a somewhat equivocal image of spirit; the first poem has pine-covered hills stretching up to a moon “like a demon’s ark,” while the second gives us an overgrown garden filled with poisons hosting nightingales whose song draws the attention of ruby-eyed serpents. The garden’s the image of the soul of whoever the speaker’s addressing, and it’s striking how difficult it is to be sure of the poet’s attitude to his interlocutor. Filled with unhealthy stuff, the garden also has moonlight and birdsong and a kind of sinister beauty.

The atmosphere of the poems is indeed deeply weird. It’s interesting to compare them to poems that appeared in The Thrill Book, the quasi-predecessor of Weird Tales. Smith had work in that magazine, too, but most of the other poems were simpler and more romantic. Smith’s interest in the Decadents is visible here, mixing tones in a way that fits Weird Tales in particular.

At this point, there’s just the editorial section called “The Eyrie” left to discuss, which this issue is mainly a letters column. Editor Edwin Baird begins by claiming that everyone likes a weird story, and picks the first two letters to prove his point: the first is from Ernest Hollenbeck, who sent Weird Tales a story he wrote on his seventy-seventh birthday, and the next’s from an 11-year-old girl, Eleanor Gause. Baird follows with letters from 14-year-old and 11-year-old boys, and says he has other letters from “boys and girls in their ’teens.” But he moves on to present effusive praise from adult readers.

Most of the letters are fairly generic in their support for the magazine. I note one unnamed letter writer from Houghton, Michigan, criticises the cover art, and Baird acknowledges “We, too, believe that our covers have not been what they should have been, and we’re trying to improve them. We think we’ve made some improvement on the cover of the present issue, and we hope to do still better next time.” Baird also published a pair of letters that are critical of specific stories while being overall happy with the magazine.

There’s an interesting air of light-heartedness to the letters that’s quite distinct from the horror aspect of the magazine; and yet the letter-writers on the whole do seem to appreciate the adrenalin rush of the horror. I find it interesting that Baird stepped back this issue from saying much himself in this editorial section. Instead we get more and longer responses to the magazine from regular readers (that is, not writers for Weird Tales) than we’ve seen in earlier issues. If reader response is picking up, that has to be a good sign. I’m not sure how many useful specifics there are in the letters, but the enthusiasm’s nice to see.

Overall, the magazine seems to be finding its stride in terms of format and tone. The poems are a good choice, but read a little oddly sitting beside the non-fiction pieces. Still, the magazine’s moving forward; the better cover art helps. But of course the magazine has to live and die with its fiction. And the news on that front is mixed, as I’ll discuss in two weeks.

Find all my posts about Weird Tales here!

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Matthew David Surridge is the author of “The Word of Azrael,” from Black Gate 14. You can buy collections of his essays on fantasy novels here and here. His Patreon, hosting a short fiction project based around the lore within a Victorian Book of Days, is here. You can find him on Facebook, or follow his Bluesky account, @bookofdays.