The first issue of Weird Tales went on sale in late February of 1923. It was cover-dated March, but that was a sell-by date. The issue would have arrived in stores on or about February 18, roughly a week before the first issue of Time magazine. In writing about early Weird Tales, I found it useful to think about that kind of context, and to look into that moment in history.

Partly that was because some aspect of a story would occasionally become clear once I understood specific terms or references or background. Mostly, though, I found an immersion in the time helped themes become clearer and habits of thought more obvious. In the hope that exercise might be useful for anyone else reading early Weird Tales or other fiction of the 1920s, I’ll be putting up a series of posts looking at different aspects of the era, reflecting on things I’ve learned or think I’ve learned. I hope these posts will also be useful as references I can link to in my reviews, rather than having to take the time to explain some 1920s-specific detail in a story.

You can find a list here of some of the books I found useful in understanding the early 1920s, along with links to all of my writing about Weird Tales. Note that I am not a historian, though I have written some pop history. Note as well that I am not American, and therefore do not necessarily know what sort of things about American history are well-known to Americans (so apologies in advance for perhaps going over well-trodden ground).

As a first observation: it’s tempting, at least for me, to think the 1920s weren’t that long ago. Not in the way that the Victorian era was long ago. There are many more motion pictures from the 1920s, and more colour photography, and more recorded sound. Of course the era lacked technologies we take for granted, but it’s alive in ways previous eras aren’t. Only, the closer you look at the 1920s, the more differences from the present stand out. Things we understand about the world have not yet come to be grasped, while other things then known have since vanished, and the whole thing is that much stranger than it looks at a glance: more weird.

So I think it’s worth writing several posts about aspects of the time. As a framework for talking about the age, imagine yourself in 1923. It is late February, and you’re living in a large American city. You’re setting out from your home to walk to a newsstand to buy the first issue of a new fiction magazine. What do you see?

As you leave your home, it my be worth thinking about what that home looks like. Perhaps it’s a stand-alone house, but over the last hundred years apartment buildings have become increasingly common, first for the very poor and then, starting about fifty years previously, the very rich. Apartments for the poor are often called tenements, though a distinction frequently made between an apartment and a tenement holds that each unit of an apartment has both a private kitchen and a private bathroom. But the rich have increasingly turned to apartment living since the end of the Great War; large houses have become extremely costly to keep up since the introduction of the income tax in 1913, along with the advent of the postwar “servant problem” (finding people to staff and maintain a large house). Why not get an apartment in the city, have a private house in the country nearby, and take advantage of the new motorcars to speed back and forth from one to the other?

Therefore in 1923 apartment buildings for various income levels are now being built. It is also easy to find variations on apartment life, notably residential hotels (hotels with long-term tenants), including boarding houses (tenants rent rooms and proprietors provide meals) and rooming houses (the same, without meals). These options are typically cheaper than apartments, but might include landlords with strict ideas about appropriate tenant behaviour, and lack individual washrooms and kitchens. Conversely, they might be establishments specifically for specific kinds of people (boarding houses for young women are not uncommon) or to support a certain community (such as, say, vegetarians — an unusual diet in 1923, but far from unheard of).

It is also true that some poor and middle-class families take in lodgers for the sake of extra income, though those are declining; 17 percent of urban households took in a boarder in 1910, only 11 percent in 1930. At any rate, the middle of the 1920s will see a construction boom in housing, though mostly for single-family homes as the car allows for the construction of new suburbs and sometimes satellite cities — pre-planned communities influenced by the Garden City movement. Bungalows are becoming a popular housing choice for families as the middle class slowly expands; between 1910 and 1930 80,000 bungalows are built in Chicago alone (and 20,000 more in Chicago suburbs). This is part of a general construction boom, as new homes go up with water and electrical connections built in.

As you close your front door behind you, you might glance in the direction of downtown and likely see another kind of building entirely. Taller skyscrapers are rising in downtowns across North America — and whatever city you’re in, you probably think of downtown, the central business district, as the city’s core. Many cities are in fact developing secondary business districts at this time, and physically downtowns are relatively small, one or two percent of the land area of a city. But that’s because buildings are growing taller, and downtowns becoming more monumental.

Skyscrapers have been around for decades, but postwar prosperity means more are going up all the time. The tallest building in the world in 1923 is New York’s Woolworth Building, at 53 stories just shy of 800 feet, but by now there are skyscrapers in every American city. Elevators are a necessity for these kinds of structures, complete with operators; the technology exists to automate them, but passengers don’t trust ‘driverless’ elevators. The amount of skyscrapers going up has led to campaigns in major cities for height limits, which in turn led to New York passing the country’s first comprehensive zoning ordinance in 1916. (And then that led to New York skyscrapers developing a distinctive step pattern, like stretched-out ziggurats, as they complied with the need for setbacks at various levels.) Heavy industry’s moved out of most downtowns by 1923, as real estate becomes more valuable, and a number of cultural organisations are also pushed out by cost or by being overshadowed by skyscrapers — there’s an idea at this time that places like museums and symphony halls shouldn’t just house art, but be art themselves. And it’s hard to stand out visually in the shadow of buildings two or three dozen stories tall.

But the new skyscrapers are often visual standouts themselves, and not just for their height. Eclectic designs create eye-catching facades for the skyscrapers, such as the Woolworth Building’s neo-gothic exterior. And yet a new aesthetic is coming that, among other things, will do away with ornament in architecture. This will not be universal; for example, a neo-classic movement is shaping some government buildings and national monuments in a traditional visual language of power and authority, with the Lincoln Memorial (completed in 1922) a prominent American example. But in Europe, although there are expressionist architects who experiment with symbolic forms and colourful patterns of brick, and a fascinating Constructivist architectural movement in the Soviet Union, increasingly the cutting edge of architecture belongs to modernism.

European design and architecture has largely moved on from pre-war Art Nouveau, with its sinuous natural lines. Modernist architects are cutting back on ornament, believing (in the words of American pre-modernist skyscraper designer Louis Sullivan) that form follows function. Architects like Adolf Loos are interested in designing space rather than creating facades. Modernists are finding new forms for buildings that use materials invented in the 19th century — cast iron, reinforced concrete, and plate glass, for example. In Germany, a fine art school and an arts and crafts school were merged in 1919 into one institution under the direction of Walter Gropius, and named the Staatliches Bauhaus; the Bauhaus style is already having a significant influence on architecture and design, and is shaping the European avant-garde more broadly. (Among the faculty at the Bauhaus in 1923 are painters Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee.)

This is in fact the era when ‘industrial design’ as a concept begins to be articulated, as seen in the work of figures like architect, book designer, and typeface designer Peter Behrens. Gropius had worked in Behrens’ studio, as had Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, an architect whose modernist approach was summed up in his favourite maxim “less is more,” and Charles Jeanneret, who in 1920 had adopted the name Le Corbusier. In 1923 Le Corbusier will publish a book, Vers une architecture (Towards an Architecture, sometimes translated Towards a New Architecture), which will become one of the most significant architectural manifestos of the 20th century. A series of polemics about how people interact with living space, Le Corbusier writes of a kind of significant harmony in machines and mechanisation — “a house is a machine for living in,” he claims, and through the rest of the 20s and beyond will illustrate his theories of space and form in a classically-influenced modernism.

Left: Chicago Tribune Tower. Right: The McGraw Hill Building

Modernism will come to shape American architecture. Raymond Hood collaborated in the design of the gothic Chicago Tribune Tower in 1922 (with John Mead Howells; construction was completed in 1925), but his design for the McGraw Hill Building, completed in 1931, will be a triumph of restrained modernism. Later, in the 30s, many of the design elements and philosophies of modernist architecture will become known as the “International Style,” which will shape architecture into the 1970s; an architecture of minimalism, open interiors, and functionalism.

Again, there will be exceptions. Frank Lloyd Wright, 55 years old in 1923, insists on integrating buildings with their environment, as with his Chicago-area Prairie Style buildings. His philosophy of “organic architecture” aims to unify the human world and the natural world. Distinctively American rather than a European modernist, in 1923 Wright will design houses using a “textile block” system of prefabricated concrete, but incorporate a Mayan-style facade, a contrast to Loos’ austere insistence that “ornament is criminal.”

Still, I think there is an argument that the International Style and modernist architecture more broadly represent a major change in visual sensibility that’s beginning to take hold at about this time. Ideas of what wealth and power look like, and how they relate to the future and technology, are changing. So, for example, the gothic or neo-gothic mansions that gave rise to the archetypal image of the haunted house will become uncommon as expensive houses are built in the new style, with new materials and new ideas of how to manipulate space. Contrast something like the Winchester House (rebuilt repeatedly until about 1910) with Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater (1934) or Richard Neutra’s Lovell House (1927-29).

You can see the change in sensibility in small things as well as large. Here’s Evelyn Waugh in Brideshead Revisited, whose narrator in the 1940s looks back fondly on his memories of a mansion in the 1920s:

I was always given the room I had on my first visit; it was next to Sebastian’s, and we shared what had once been a dressing-room and had been changed to a bathroom twenty years back by the substitution for the bed of a deep, copper, mahogany-framed bath, that was filled by pulling a brass lever heavy as a piece of marine engineering; the rest of the room remained unchanged; a coal fire always burned there in winter. I often think of that bathroom—the water-colours dimmed by steam and the huge towel warming on the back of the chintz armchair—and contrast it with the uniform, clinical little chambers, glittering with chromium plate and looking-glass, which pass for luxury in the modern world.

The last sentence is important, I think; the idea of luxury has changed. You can see it bathrooms as well as anywhere else. New materials give rise to new visual ideals, but the temptation to look back to an older aesthetic remains.

Separately from modernism, though, a new style is taking over from Art Nouveau in art and design as well as architecture. More decorative and colourful than modernism, it will also use new materials, and notably be used in skyscraper facades. Geometric shapes, alternating thick and thin lines, rounded corners, stylisation of human and natural forms — in 1925 this design approach will be displayed in a Paris exhibition of “arts décoratifs,” and from that exhibition will eventually come (in the 1960s) the style’s name: Art Deco.

Unlike Modernism, Art Deco will not have manifestos or really much conceptual unity. In 1923 it is in the process of being born out of a mishmash of influences and art movements — Cubism, the Fauves, the Futurists, the Dutch artists and artisans of the De Stijl movement, Russian Constructivism, the abstraction being developed by Kandinsky and others, the sets and costumes of Sergei Diaghilev’s Russian Ballet, even the architecture of the Mayans and Aztecs. (And perhaps this fascination with the look of pre-Colombian civilisations is not that different from the fascination that births stories of explorers finding lost pyramids and hidden cities within South American forests.) It is the 1925 International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts that will see Deco crystallise. Twenty countries will participate, putting up pavilions to demonstrate new architectural ideas, with the pavilions holding furniture and decorative items showing new ideas in design.

Significantly, Germany will not be invited to participate due to its role in World War I. This meant that Gropius and the Bauhaus, with their stern anti-ornamental modernism, were largely unrepresented at the Exhibition. The United States will also not take part in the Exposition, as the Exposition’s charter will forbid works that historicise the past, and Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover will feel that the United States has not produced sufficiently original modern work. But the Americans will send a 108-person delegation to the Exposition made up of representatives from trade organisations and art guilds, and hundreds more Americans will attend the Exposition as private citizens. They’ll see the architecture of the pavilions in their Deco style, and see the Deco approach in jewelry, ceramics, furniture, and other objects of daily life. And they will reproduce this look in their work, and influence others in their turn.

Where Modernism believes in mass production and making mass-produced goods as beautiful and high-quality as possible, Deco will tend toward the artisanal and to fine craftsmanship. Deco architecture will use wrought iron for structure and ornament, evoking a machine-age sheen, and like neo-classicism it will speak a language of power and awe. Later in the 1920s and well into the 1930s it will be the architecture of movie palaces and movie sets; in 1929 it will appear in the New York skyline in the form of the 680-foot Chanin Building, be taken to even greater heights the next year with the 77-story 1048-foot Chrysler Building, and in 1931 shape the 102-story 1250-foot Empire State Building.

But 1931 is far away from 1923, perhaps conceptually even more so than chronologically. These massive skyscrapers and their Art Deco fantasies are not yet visible, or even really conceivable. Let us move on, and set out into the street toward our local newsstand; in two weeks we’ll consider that street, and ways of getting about in the year 1923.

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.