The second issue of Weird Tales, on sale from March of 1923 through to April, looked much like the first: a pulp magazine 6 and a half inches by 9 and a half, with 192 pages. The black-white-and-red cover was more striking than the previous issue’s, with the main image contained in a thick red frame, and the date and price more easily visible under the title. There was a new and smoother-looking logo. Unlike the first issue, this cover didn’t share a format with that month’s issue of Weird Tales’ older sister publication Detective Tales.

In fact, the cover’s about all you might hope for from a magazine called Weird Tales. Mysterious gigantic eyes stare out of darkness, while from just below them pink rays shoot out to strike a man who screams and throws out his hands. It’s not terribly sophisticated — background details are nonexistent or lost in the ink wash, and you can’t help but wonder if the mysterious creature in shadows is firing rays from its nostrils. But it is an image that tells you things supernatural and horrific lurk within these pages.

This post will take a look at the physical and editorial package of the second issue of Weird Tales, with an eye to tracking the magazine’s evolution. It’ll run long, because I’ve included numerous extracts from pulp magazine editorials — mostly for the sake of making an argument about how Weird Tales was positioning itself in its marketplace, but partly, I have to admit, for historical interest and potential amusement value.

To return to the second issue of Weird Tales: only one story’s advertised on the cover, “The Whispering Thing” by Laurie McClintock and Culpeper Chunn, in a font that strikes me as oddly similar to the ones used on the covers of 80s horror paperbacks. At any rate, the magazine promises “Thrills!! Mystery!! Terror!!” which is what you want to hear, and these promises do work with the cover image. Visually, the interior’s as simple as the first issue, without illustrations except for some decorative devices at the end of stories to fill up blank space on the page. The first issue had inset boxes on the second page of some stories advertising another story by the writer in an upcoming issue; this one doesn’t.

Before going on to talk about the issue’s short non-fiction pieces and its editorial pages, let’s consider the ads. The back cover ad has a splashy headline declaring “$1000 REWARD For the Capture of This Man.” It’s actually selling a course to become a “Finger Print Detective,” with the bonus of a “Free Course in Secret Service Intelligence;” it’s similar to the ad on the back of the first issue, which was also from the ‘University of Applied Science.’ Flip through the magazine and you see other ads repeated from the first issue (at least based on the copy at the Internet Archive, which doesn’t include whatever was on the inside covers).

Study to become an ‘electrical expert.’ Or a draftsman. Buy a book of etiquette. Or take a different course in fingerprints from a different school. Those are full-page ads before or following the table of contents; no ads interrupt the fiction, then before the editorial section there’s a full-page ad for Detective Tales. Then a request for submissions of “skeletons” in readers’ family history, a recounting of a weird event between 500 and 1000 words long for which the magazine would pay $5.

Then: ads for watches (one a full page), a treatment for catarrh, Detective Tales again. Send away for diamond rings, guns, tires, a shaving set or a serge dress. Become a tailoring agent or a railway mail clerk. Get a course from Arthur Murray, “America’s foremost authority on social dancing.” Or you can try to cure lethargy or a host of other ailments with an Elco Electric Health Generator: “They operate on the electric light in your house or on their own motive power at less than 50 cents per year. Elco Health Generators are positively the only instruments which can give you in one Electricity, Violet Ray—Vibration and Ozone—the four greatest curative agents.”

Very similar ads and layout to those of the first issue, in other words. Very general ads, too. There aren’t even the ads for typewriters or astrological readings of the first issue. If the magazine had a strong sense of its identity, it doesn’t seem to have communicated it to advertisers.

As with the first issue, various nonfiction ‘news’ items fill the space left on a page after the end of a story. One nonfiction piece is a full page and has an entry in the table of contents, so I’ll deal with it when I talk about the fiction. The first piece, following the first story, claims “Thrillers Make Audiences Warm,” noting an MIT professor’s study, and getting quotes from theatre managers who agree with the study that mystery plays increase the temperature in a theatre. A cinema owner disagrees, but says a comedy turns up the heat. I can’t find anything about this affecting modern movie audiences and air conditioning, but I note that there’s some evidence that the tone of a scene can be calculated based on how the exhalations of the audience change the chemical composition of the cinema atmosphere.

The second piece, at the end of the second story, claims “Murderous Sheik Flees to Forest,” recounting a story in which a woman in France was attacked by an obsessed “Moroccan sheik.” Despite names and locations being given, I can’t find any information about the incident.

The third piece, after the fourth story, is almost a full page long, discussing two controversies under the headline “Has ‘Tut’s’ Tomb Really Been Found?” First, it quotes a dean of Cornell University, W.A. Hammond, criticising the discoverers of the tomb of the Pharaoh Tutankhamun. Hammond’s criticisms are interesting to read in light of modern debates about archaeology and colonialism: “How would you like it if, 3,000 years from now, the Saracens had superseded our civilization and had broken into George Washington’s tomb at Mount Vernon? How would you like it if Abraham Lincoln’s bones were carried off to Constantinople and placed on display in a Saracen museum? Yet that is precisely what Lord Carnarvon now is doing, while the scientific world applauds.”

That’s followed by some Egyptologists expressing doubt that Howard Carter’s Carnarvon-backed expedition had actually found Tutankhamun’s tomb. They point out that the tomb’s unusually small; this is accurate, but contemporary thinking apparently is that Tut’s unexpected death led to him being interred in a modest pre-existing tomb rather than a large specially-built structure.

The next story’s followed by a piece promising “More About the Egyptians.” Bylined with the initials ‘J.K.,’ it discusses some of the laws of the ancient Egyptians. Three stories after that is an article ungrammatically stating “Find Skull of Man Million Years Old,” stating that Dr. J.G. Wolfe discovered a million-year-old skull in Patagonia, as well as the ruins of an ancient city. An article in a 1978 issue of the Field Museum of Natural History Bulletin notes that the skull turned out to be a curiously-shaped stone, the city was an ancient lava bed, and Wolfe an amateur with no scientific or archaeological training who “wrote extravagant stories in order to sell them.”

If million-year-old cities are too extreme to be believed, what then of the next piece, three stories later, which asks: “Did Solomon Give Queen of Sheba an Airship?” The piece quotes Colonel Lockwood Marsh, the Secretary of the Royal Aeronautical Society, who apparently read Egyptologist Wallis Budge’s translation of the Kebra Nagast, a 14th-century Ethiopian historical epic, and noticed a reference to King Solomon giving the Queen of Sheba “a vessel wherein one could traverse the air (or wind)” that he’d made with his divine wisdom. Outside of Ethiopia, the Kebra Nagast is not considered historically reliable, but Marsh’s image of Solomon building a Zeppelin is charming.

The last piece, after the end of the next-to-last story in the magazine, is a one-sentence article headlined “Send Photographs By Radio.” It reads: “That pictures can be broadcast by radio was proved recently when photographs of President Harding, Vice President Coolidge and Governor Pinchot of Pennsylvania were sent from the Naval Radio Station in Washington, D. C., to a radio receiving station in Philadelphia.” This is perfectly accurate; the demonstration was made on March 3, 1923.

What are the articles doing in the context of the magazine? Not to be too obvious, but they’re rounding out a magazine that names itself Weird Tales. They’re about things that 1923 considers to be weird, and therefore things that will heighten the effect of the stories around them, and add to the atmosphere the magazine’s trying to create. So there are two extensive pieces on Tutankhamun and Egypt; a general craze for Egyptiana had begun following the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in November of 1922, and it’d grow stronger as reports from the excavation filtered back to North America. It’s only natural to see that reflected here. There’s an interest in strange theories of ancient history more generally, as seen in the piece about Solomon’s airship and the faked ancient skull. Add a true-crime piece, and two stories about strange science stories — pop science, in a sense, dealing with theatres and radio — and you see the subject-matter of the fiction reflected here: obsessive emotional states, the revelations of science, above all the mysteries of the ancient world and things that contradict or expand the accepted narrative of the past.

The last piece of non-fiction in the issue is the editorial section called “The Eyrie.” Editor Edwin Baird leads off by stating that the magazine’s drawn a lot of positive letters, then notes that it must make money to continue in business:

As we remarked before, WEIRD TALES is an experiment. There has never been another magazine quite like this, hence nobody knows whether or not such a magazine will pay. And, of course, if a magazine doesn’t pay it promptly ceases to exist.

We do believe, though, that WEIRD TALES has entered upon a long and flourishing journey. We know there are multitudes of readers who like this kind of magazine and are willing to buy it. Are these readers numerous enough to support WEIRD TALES? The answer is up to you.

But we’ll never get anywhere unless we all work together. It’s our job to publish the right sort of magazine. It’s yours to buy it. If we both do these things as we should—why, then, of course WEIRD TALES is sure to succeed. Nothing can stop it.

Arguing that it’s the “job” of a magazine’s readers to buy the magazine is a strange rhetorical approach, but for the moment I want to point out Baird’s insistence on the experimental nature of the magazine. That echoes what he wrote in the first issue. Whether he believed it or not, it was what he wanted his readers to believe Weird Tales was or was striving to be.

Baird then goes on to complain about the number of poor-quality manuscripts he must sort through to find stories for Weird Tales — “And if anybody thinks that ours is the easiest task he should sit at our desk for a day or so and wade through the rivers of manuscripts that are flooding us like the waters of spring.” From there he introduces some letters from readers. H.W. of Sterling, Illinois (actually writer Harold Ward, who had fiction in the first issue as well as this one) has “always delighted in stories of the ‘Dracula’ type and that Sax Rohmer stuff.” C.L. Austin of Amsterdam, New York warns “unless the editor is the kind of man who is brave enough to stick for his ideals, regardless of his job, there must be much vacillation, with a consequent loss of valuable material and a depreciation in the reading value of the magazine,” to which Baird promises:

… the editorial policy of WEIRD TALES is not dictated by the business office. We will stand or fall on our platform of “something new in magazine fiction.” If you support us, we shall be able to give you what you want. If you turn thumbs down, we’ll blow out the gas and go home in the dark. In any event, there will be no compromise. WEIRD TALES, as long as it lives, will always be “The Unique Magazine.”

So again Baird emphasises “something new” and the magazine’s subtitle promising the unique. The following letters praise the magazine, and claim there’s an audience for “horror” and “grim” stories despite “the general editorial prejudice against weird stories” (in the words of someone claiming to be S.O.B. of Beulah, New Mexico). Several letters mention Poe as a favourite, with the implication that the magazine’s following in his footsteps. But if it’s odd to follow claims for the magazine’s experimental quality with comparisons to a writer who died just under 75 years before the first issue came out, there is a precedent, just as there was in fact a precedent for Weird Tales more generally.

In 1919 Street & Smith, longtime pulp and dime novel publishers, put out 16 issues of a magazine called The Thrill Book (all 16 are available at the Internet Archive, with a bit of digging). It was published twice a month from March 1 to its final issue on October 15, edited for the first 8 issues by Harold Hersey and the final 8, in a longer format, by Ronald Oliphant. It had more interior art than the early Weird Tales — each story got its own illustration — and it used short vaguely Romantic poems to fill space on the page where a story ended, instead of short news pieces, but otherwise the two magazines are fairly similar. It’s often viewed as an early attempt at publishing a fiction magazine specialising in fantasy and horror, anticipating Weird Tales. The reality’s mixed; there were fantasy and horror stories in the magazine, as well as science fiction from writters including future Hugo winner Murray Leinster, but there were also westerns, comedies, and adventure stories.

The later belief that The Thrill Book was trying to do the same thing as Weird Tales is understandable, though. Look at how the editors, especially Hersey, describe the magazine and you see some claims very similar to what Edwin Baird would say in the first couple of issues of Weird Tales. The back covers of Hersey’s issues were given over to editorials praising the magazine and touting its success; I’m going to quote from those, sometimes extensively, not only because of the similarities to Weird Tales but also what they suggest about how a magazine focussing on this sort of subject matter was likely to be perceived.

From the first issue, a piece titled “What You May Expect In The Thrill Book:”

Little by little we became convinced that there were whole cargoes of good things being jettisoned because editors and publishers lacked the temerity to publish the unusual, the illogical, the bizarre, swiftly moving story, under the plea that it was ‘too wild.’

Now, we do not think that the American reader, whose intelligence is away above the average of that of the citizen of any other country, wants his reading matter arbitrarily chosen for him any more than he wishes his religion so selected. Therefore, we conceived the idea of presenting The Thrill Book to you, wherein we are going to publish every kind of fiction, irrespective of whether it is logical or illogical, provided it is clean, interesting, and really tells a story, which a great deal of the fiction in present-day magazines does not do. In The Thrill Book, therefore, you will find interesting stories of every kind — stories of queer, psychological phenomena, of mystic demonstrations, weird adventures in the air, on the earth and sea, and under the sea, in that vast domain of the Fourth Dimension — and of things that men feel but cannot explain.

Hersey sets out clearly what he’s talking about, emphasising the fantastic and the weird, and makes claims for the daring nature of the magazine, stating it dares to publish what others won’t. Baird would say the same general things about Weird Tales. Hersey goes further, praising the (American) reader and implicitly linking the magazine’s daring to the First Amendment while also stating the magazine’s fiction would be “clean.”

The next issue’s piece is called “The New Reader.” It’s longer than the first issue’s editorial, and I’ll quote more of it:

The reader of to-day is far more discriminating than the reader of yesterday. Not only has he undergone a natural change through the past four years of unparalleled and savage warfare, but he has come to resent mawkishness and cheap sentiment. He cannot bear any longer the innocuous, milk-and-water fiction of a generation ago. He wants the truth. He wants it straight from the shoulder without any namby-pamby mollycoddling or lecturing. The collections of short stories, for example, which appear in American magazines do not all show that this fact is appreciated. This may explain certain things. Either the average magazine stoops to silly femininity, or it runs to an extreme and publishes impossible tales of illogical people in illogical plots. The normal person revolts at such a hurly-burly of ideas. The modern mind, especially, demands at least an exact portraiture of human character, and it does not want these characters to go through the same monotonous chain of events. We want new situations. We cannot bear the ancient lack of reality. The terrors of war have opened to us all the unseen, the previously unbelievable. We recognize at last that there are things in the darkened worlds of feeling that are worth our exploration and study. There is not one of us who is unprepared to face any conclusion; any fact, any situation, as long as we know that it is based on human motives. One might say that the last four years have proven that the human race is capable of anything. It can suffer, starve, die, without complaint and for ideals which hold out no hope of personal reward. Is this not a proof that the people of the earth are anxious to have their thinkers take up these problems and attempt to shed some light upon the sources of feeling which drove men to perish for their dreams? Even the most casual soul has awakened to the realization that life contains mysteries capable of solution, but which have lain neglected these many years because of a false attitude toward the occult, the mysterious, the unseen. One difficulty has been that so much dishonesty has paraded beneath the banners of the occult.

[…]

We admire the courage with which [our writers] have torn aside the veils of reason and opened up amazingly interesting channels of thought. There is no doubt but what the stories are going to raise questions which our readers will seek to solve. In the weird, the bizarre, the fantastic type of story we go straight to the fundamentals whether we will or no. The story may remain gripping and interesting as a pure example of what a crashingly alive piece of fiction ought to be, but this new trend in human thought shakes our imagination down to the roots. There is no magazine to-day which so whole-heartedly assumes this duty of supplying the demands of the people. You cannot possibly be intelligent unless you are willing to take up these after-the-war spiritual questions in a sensible fashion. What could be more pleasing than to find a new faith, a new hope, in the stories which are appearing in The Thrill Book? After all, we want to be assured, all of us, but you will find that The Thrill Book as a sort of unofficial semimonthly representative of a great fiction club will become a necessity to you in a few weeks. It will publish the type of material which the conventional magazine of to-day has dreaded. It will stand back of an unknown Poe, a De Maupassant, a Bierce, a Norris, or an O. Henry with all its strength because we believe that such a writer deserves unqualified support not only because he has been so long neglected, but due to the fact that he is thoroughly abreast of the times.

Let’s note first that given the context, Hersey’s saying what he thinks readers want to hear and will buy; how much he believes what he says beyond that is unknowable (incidentally, I think but am not sure that the “Norris” he mentions in the last sentence is the naturalistic writer Frank Norris). Presumably Hersey’s intending to be taken at least somewhat seriously, though. So: the war’s made readers tough and ready for new things; worth reflecting that historian W. Scott Poole, in his book Wasteland, has written about World War I as the origin of modern horror, especially in film. Hersey, meanwhile, goes on to say that “silly femininity” is to be avoided. Hersey’s known, among other things, for a supposedly-comedic poem called “The Lavender Cowboy” about an unmanly cowboy trying to prove his worth; he appears to have had a theme that haunted him, is my point. As a contrast, in issue 11 (volume 2 number 3), Hersey’s successor as editor published a letter from a Mrs. Thelma Dale of Hoboken, New Jersey, stating:

Although a woman, I fail to see any point or purpose in half the usual magazine stories being published nowadays. They are weak, lame, insipid, distorted efforts, thinly veneered junk, which might find better destiny in a wastebasket than in a magazine.

Any one who thinks a woman doesn’t like red-blooded stories, with the tang of mystery, thrilling adventures, ghostly horror, and the lure of the occult, doesn’t know the feminine mind. The sickly sentimental stuff is nauseating—we get so much of that without needing a magazine! Give us live-wire stories; make us realize that we are human, not mere petticoated dolls.

So Hersey may have been riding his own hobby-horse. It would certainly come up in later issues. But for the moment let’s look at what else he had to say in the second issue.

He talks about novelty, about the newness of what The Thrill Book will do, and presents that as a function of idealism and artistic mission. The kind of fiction The Thrill Book will publish, he declares, will open up “darkened worlds of feeling,” and “the unseen, the previously unbelievable.” Notably, while he talks about “the weird, the bizarre, the fantastic type of story,” he also talks about occultism and spiritualism. The fantastic and the occult are linked, and the interest in fantasy has to do, at least implicitly, with the experience of the War. The fantasy he has in mind is more to do with the occult than with myth or surrealism, and may not be fantasy at all but the manifestation of a new spiritual faith.

Related to that and Hersey’s concern with gender is the “courage” he finds in writers exploring new themes, a toughness in writing “straight from the shoulder.” This sounds like something that would go along with exploring horror themes, but The Thrill Book actually had relatively few straight-ahead horror stories. He does mention Poe as an example of what the magazine wants to do, and again there’s the contradiction, as with Weird Tales, of claiming to be doing something new while also looking back to a writer in the first half of the previous century; both insisting on the magazine’s novelty, and insisting on a lineage of previous writers. (Worth noting that to some extent these magazines were ahead of the curve; Poe’s status as a literary artist, on the rise since Baudelaire’s translation of his works into French had led to a vogue for Poe in France, would further increase in the Anglophone world later in the 1920s with a number of book-length studies of Poe and major essays by writers such as Malcolm Cowley and Edmund Wilson.)

Bearing Hersey’s subjects in mind, here are some quotes from the back covers of his other issues, starting with his piece from issue 3, “The Right Stuff:”

We started this magazine with a definite purpose in view, that purpose being to publish the type of story which possesses a real backbone of virility, an unusual texture, and a plot holding the interest from beginning to end. It can be done. It will be done. We are not going to put “space fillers” in The Thrill Book. We are not going to use the drab, dull, conventional narrative that is laid around ancient scenery and behind-the-times characters. We started with the belief that all the readers, or rather the kind of readers we wanted, had good, red blood in their veins. We didn’t hope to appeal to the “backward-looking” spirit who seemingly is content to read the same kind of silly story by the same tiresome writers. We believe this type of reader is so sadly in the minority that he couldn’t be found except after arduous searching. We can’t understand how even this small minority like the milk-and-water fiction that leaves a bad taste in the mouth. We have grown dissatisfied lately — The Thrill Book being the result of a lot of thought along these lines. We finally determined to launch what we thought deserved a place in American literature — a magazine that not only published the weird and harrowing, but also the mystical, adventurous, spiritist, fantastic, and bizarre tale; in other words, any sort of story that lifted one out of this lethargy into which one falls while reading the average magazine.

Here he is in issue 5, “When the Shoe Fits,” citing three stories in that issue (including eventual Weird Tales writer Seabury Quinn’s “The Stone Image”) and stating that they all have:

… a strange, wild element that holds the interest absorbingly from the first line to the last. These are stories of virility in the finest sense of the term. Not a line of namby-pamby, milk-and-water philosophy from cover to cover. Not a trace of the usual, the dull, the average. It is in stories such as these that one discerns hope for such a necessary outlet as The Thrill Book. We know this for a certainty now. The American public is responding in its wholehearted way to our efforts. We have filled a distinct need. It is so strange that no one ever realized the importance of the occult and the bizarre in a practical way until this magazine appeared. Why, it is as plain as the nose on our face that Edgar Allan Poe is a great figure in American literature. Why? Simply because he dared to do the unusual, the fantastic, the occult in fiction. He, literally, opened up worlds of feeling, and thought. Yet it was normal, sane and interesting. It is a start in fiction which The Thrill Book is bringing to concentrated light.

And:

In this magazine we are making it possible for the public to read at a small price the type of story that other magazines frown upon for the simple reason that they deal with the unseen, the unusual. Let us say that we have a desire to stick to our convictions. We believe in the extraordinary tale. We feel that The Thrill Book story will soon become synonymous for all that is fascinating and bizarre in literature. We are pioneers in the occult and mystic story. We are the only magazine that devotes itself intelligently to pure fiction along untraveled lines. These things are not mere mind vaporings. You have seen these early issues. You have had a chance to judge for yourself.

From issue 6, “How About It?”

What literally swept us off our feet was the whole-hearted reception accorded us from the very start when we announced that at last a periodical was coming forth with the practical theory that the good story did exist and only needed discovery and publication. The trouble was that previously fiction had fallen into a rut. It moved in well-oiled grooves. It was often finely done. It possessed plots of no mean texture, but it lacked in vitality. The spinal column of American fiction was beginning to suffer from a peculiar disease that might be termed “laziness.” The poor patient could hardly hold his head up. Stories started well, ended poorly, failing utterly to hold our interest. What was the reason? Many things contributed to this state of affairs, the most important being the set condition of mind of those who conducted the ordinary, humdrum carrier of fiction. They imagined, foolishly, that the American reader was humdrum also. It is almost unbelievable that such an opinion could exist. Naturally it ended in a static muddle—a kind of stagnant pool.

The American loves “pep.” He eats it up. He likes to see and meet people with energy and imagination. That is one of the reasons why we succeeded so well “over there” in the Great War. It has contributed largely to the astounding place which the United States now occupies as a leader of the world’s thought. In the same way the American likes to read stories with ideas and real punch. The harder you hit the better he feels. The Thrill Book stands for just such an ideal. We are proud to admit that we are an American institution already. Just as Edgar Allan Poe showed sleepy old Europe that a real short story could be written, so are we going to prove that a magazine publishing vital, original fiction can prosper. We have found to our satisfaction that it can do so as easily as rolling off a log just as long as we continue our policy of giving the reader what he wants. Look over the issues that have appeared and buy each new one as it comes out, and we are sure you will agree with us that at last you can find square-rigged, red-blood, honestly absorbing stories of a kind that have been jettisoned by the other magazines.

Issue 7, back cover, “Among Ourselves:”

It is positively the first time in American literature that a magazine has sanely attempted to publish the unusual and thrilling type of story, without developing into a “blood-and-thunder, kill-’em-quick” periodical.

We have known for many years that the unusual, the fantastic, the bizarre, and the weird tales were floating about through the editorial offices without finding a home for the simple reason that editors thought they were not wanted by the public. It was a serious mistake. Is there a man living who would deny that Edgar Allan Poe was one of the greatest writers who has ever lived? And yet we ask you, could you find his type of story anywhere? No. It was frowned upon, it was relegated to the scrapheap. Many reasons can be given for this, the main one being that those who were furnishing stories had gotten out of touch with the New Reader. This has been proven to us absolutely by the letters we have received.

Issue 8, back cover, “Changing Clothes:”

The American public has been waiting for a periodical that would give them the out-of-the-way tale. It was wearied unto death by the drab, dull, and conventional. The old triangle story has played its part. The “new reader” has become disgusted with the lack of interest shown by the magazines in their hands. They have had served to them the time-worn round of plots until they have become threadbare by repeated use. Why is it that the average magazine seems to be afraid of the mysterious and occult story? Why do they run from the aspiring Ambrose Bierce or De Maupassant?

Hersey was a mediocre editor, to judge by the contents of his magazine, but a first-rate self-promoter. You see that in the way he keeps hitting a set of simple themes: newness; courage; virility; stories in the vein of Poe and Bierce. Oliphant was more restrained, abolishing the back-cover promos in favour of an editorial section called “Cross-Trails.” A promotional ad after the table of contents in issue 9 (volume 2 number 1) promises that in the story called “A Thousand Degrees Below Zero,” “Murray Leinster has created the best example of pseudoscientific fiction that has yet appeared in The Thrill Book.” It’s actually hard to disagree with that assessment; the story’s a solid if very pulpy piece of proto-SF, and there also hadn’t really been many stories like it in The Thrill Book specifically.

In the same issue Oliphant says that “we are frank enough to admit that the bizarre, the fantastic, the unusual, the adventurous, appeal to us strongly.” The next issue’s editorial section opens by reflecting on spiritualism and life after death, and asks for letters on the subject, promising to print the best and start a discussion: “Candidly, it will be as much for our own information as for yours.” Oliphant goes on: “Mind-reading, mental telepathy, and a hundred significant phenomena are established to our minds beyond dispute.” The letters he chooses to print praise the idea of a magazine dedicated to “unusual” stories, but you notice that claim of psychic powers as part of reality — the bizarre and fantastic are unusual but not impossible. Given that, it may also be worth noting that Oliphant claims in issue 11 (volume 2 number 3) that The Thrill Book “was such an unusual venture that for a long time we were not able to make writers believe that at last there was a magazine that ‘dared’ print mysterious, pseudo-scientific, occult, fantastic, and bizarre yarns.”

The Thrill Book preceded Weird Tales in promoting itself as a magazine of what we would now call fantasy and horror, but Weird Tales had the better claim to actually being a horror-fantasy magazine. Even if the stories in Baird’s run as editor tilted more to horror, and often non-supernatural horror, there was typically an intensity to them, and a coherency to the magazine overall, unlike The Thrill Book. Overall, I think The Thrill Book had higher highs and lower lows than Baird’s first Weird Tales issues, with a few excellent or notably imaginative stories scattered among dross and lighthearted period pieces. The Thrill Book was also, especially under Hersey, rather more racist than Baird’s Weird Tales. It doesn’t add up to anything like what Hersey’s grandiose statements imply, so it’s interesting to consider Baird’s use of similar rhetoric to sell and define Weird Tales.

It’s also worth considering, of course, whether other pulps were using the same kind of statements. I tried to look at early issues of magazines that started publishing within a few years of Weird Tales to see if they also claimed to be new and courageous. This was less thorough than I’d have liked; looking around the Internet Archive I found relatively few examples of issues from the first half-year or so of the run of a fiction magazine that debuted between about 1913 and 1933. I found a few early issues of Black Mask (1920), which had no editorials and little advertising; the same for the first issue of 1932’s Two-Gun Stories. Issue 4 of Thrilling Detective (also 1932) talks about the magazine’s good reception, not about trying new things. More surprisingly, there aren’t any references to doing something new in issues 3 or 4 of Hugo Gernsback’s Scientific Detective Monthly, which could legitimately claim that if nothing else. (There is an ad for Science Wonder Stories which proclaims it “A New Idea In Magazines.”)

What about Gernsback’s other magazines? One would think the man who invented science fiction would be talking up the newness of the genre, but so far as I could see this happened less than one might think. It did happen from time to time, as in an editorial from the first issue of Amazing Stories:

But this is not “another fiction magazine,” Amazing Stories is a new kind of fiction magazine! It is entirely new — entirely different — something that has never been done before in this country. Therefore, Amazing Stories deserves your attention and interest.

That editorial didn’t emphasise the vigor, manliness, and so forth of what it was doing; but issue 2 did emphasise the magazine’s opposition to romance fiction:

And it was with a feeling of gratification that we noted the almost unanimous condemnation of the so-called “sex-appeal” type of story that seems so much in vogue in this country now. Most of our correspondents seemed to heave a great sigh of relief in at last finding a literature that appeals to the imagination, rather than carrying a sensational appeal to the emotions. It is that which justifies our new venture — our expenditure of time and money.

Issue 3 sees Gernsback clearly more interested in establishing a lineage for the fiction he’s publishing, what he described as ‘scientifiction’ and we would call ‘science fiction’:

Scientifiction is not a new thing on this planet. While Edgar Allan Poe probably was one of the first to conceive the idea of a scientific story, there are suspicions that there were other scientifiction authors before him. Perhaps they were not such outstanding figures in literature and perhaps they did not write what we understand today as scientifiction at all. Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), a great genius, while he was not really an author of scientifiction, nevertheless had enough prophetic vision to create a number of machines in his own mind that were only to materialize centuries later. He described a number of machines, seemingly fantastic in those days, which would have done credit to a Jules Verne.

There may have been other scientific prophets, if not scientifiction writers, before his time, but the past centuries are so beclouded, and there are so few manuscripts of such literature in existence today, that we cannot really be sure who was the real inventor of scientifiction.

Gernsback was using his editorial presence to define his genre, to promote the use of science in fiction, and to present his magazine as being in opposition to romance and sex stories. So, different from The Thrill Book and Weird Tales.

Gernsback went bankrupt in 1929 and lost ownership of his magazines, but bounced back later that year with two more magazines. I don’t find any bragging about novelty or vigour in the first three issues of Air Wonder Stories (1929). Science Wonder Stories 1 (1929) begins with an editorial stating that yesterday’s dime novels “are laughed at by the present generation.” On the other hand:

The past decade has seen the ascendancy of “sexy” literature, of the self confession type as well as the avalanche of modern detective stories.

But they are transient things, founded on the whims of the moment. For the world moves swiftly these days and with it moves literature also.

For Gernsback, it is because science is everyday reality that science fiction’s important:

Interplanetarian trips, space flyers, talking to Mars, transplanting heads of humans, death-rays, gravity-nullifiers, transmutation of elements — why not? If not to-day, well, then, tomorrow. Are they surprises? Not to [the man in the street]; the modern man expects them …

And he emphasises continuity with his previous magazine:

I wrote a number of such stories and novels myself and gradually grouped about me a circle of authors who turned out better and better work as the years went by. I still have the best of these authors with me and practically all of them are writing and will continue to write for this magazine.

What is new is not the fiction, but its grounding in science:

It is the policy of SCIENCE WONDER STORIES to publish only such stories that have their basis in scientific laws as we know them, or in the logical deduction of new laws from what we know. And that is the reason why ALL stories published in this magazine must pass muster before an authority. It is a guarantee to our readers that they will not get a false scientific education thru the perusal of these stories.

I believe that this innovation will make new history in magazine publishing. I know of no other fiction magazine that can muster such an array of authorities and educators to pass upon the quality of its stories.

Also worth noting are the results of a reader contest asking for letters on the theme of “What science fiction means to me.” The winner, B.S. Moore, writes that “during the past ten years, I have saved all magazines wherein I found science fiction stories,” so again implicitly talking about the lineage of the form and its presence in publications that don’t specialise in the genre. The first and second Honorable Mentions, though, are different. The First Honorable Mention starts off by saying:

Science fiction is a wonderful new art. It displays new vistas, new ideals, new worlds. It lifts us above the dull, painful routine of the work-a-day world into the glorious realm of deathless romance. It carries us to the land of our dreams and lo! they are dreams no longer, but splendid, fascinating realities. Dreams moulded into concrete life! Dreams solidified into definite realities by the scientific touch woven into the delightful pattern of the dramatic plot, colored with the magic of literary style, enhanced with vivid illustration — until we forget they are dreams!

The writer of this paean to the newness of SF was one Jack Williamson of Elida, New Mexico. Gernsback had published Williamson’s first professional story in 1928; Williamson would go on to publish many, many more.

This is somewhat beside the point, but as a historical artifact I can’t resist quoting the Second Honorable Mention, which considers things from a scientist’s point of view. Specifically, the point of view of a scientist whose work Gernsback had published, Edward Elmer Smith, PhD, AKA E.E. “Doc” Smith:

To [the scientific mind] the fiction offered by the ordinary magazine has little appeal. The scientist is ordered and precise in habit of thought— thus poor workmanship, loose writing carelessness, and incoherence in his fiction will not be tolerated. He does not consider the “high-brow” magazine worth while — while the workmanship is masterly, the material is too often valueless. What shall he read? The eternal triangle leaves him cold. In general, he is married; perchance has a family grown. He has been married to one woman for years. He knows real marital love, deepening and becoming richer with every passing year. He is intrinsically decent, and knows that the vast majority of his fellow-men are likewise decent. Why waste time with such trash? Shall he read the classics? He is already thoroughly familiar with them, they hold nothing new. Love-stories? Once in a while he enjoys a real love-story. Detective stories? Occasionally. But none of these really satisfy him. The end is always clear, from the beginning — those stories were written expressly for readers having a low level of intelligence and have no appeal to the mind of which our scientist must be the possessor.

What to read?

… there is only one answer — SCIENCE FICTION. Real science fiction is written by men with trained minds— no other type of mind can write stories of that caliber. It is well-written and carefully thought out — no poorly-written story is accepted by “our magazine.” Above all, science fiction soars far above the practical, into the realm of the theoretical and oftentimes into the realm of the impossible — realms in which the scientist has always been most intensely interested. The stories themselves are entrancing, simple as fiction, and are thus of interest to any twelve-year-old, even one who cannot think at all; and yet under them and through them are found the concrete foundation and steel framework of science, to which the scientist may penetrate if he pleases and upon which he may exert as much or as little thought as he wishes. And the scientific mind, even in its moments of relaxation and without conscious effort, automatically digs deep. This fact explains the charm of science fiction for the scientific mind, and also explains the lack of appeal to that mind of ordinary fiction. For in science fiction no one really knows the answer — least of all the author, for he has studied it the most.

To return to the question of novelty-as-magazine-promotion, though, I’ll add that the first issue of Astounding Stories in 1930 lists its editorial in the table of contents as “An Introduction to a New and Unique Magazine.” But the actual editorial focuses, like Gernsback, on the newness of scientific inventions and not new things in the type of fiction in the magazine. There aren’t any editorials in the next couple of issues; issue 4 is the first with a letters column and includes this statement: “Within twenty-four hours of the time that Astounding Stories was released for sale, letters of praise began pouring into our offices, and — and this is significant — many of them clearly revealed that their writers had grasped the essential difference of the new Science Fiction magazine over the others.” That’s a statement that the magazine’s doing something new. But as I read it, it’s saying it’s doing something new specifically in science fiction. Subsequent issues talk about the importance of SF, but not precisely its novelty or vigour.

It seems unusual, then, for The Thrill Book and Weird Tales to talk about themselves as new and daring things. It’s not necessarily direct imitation of the former by the latter. The Thrill Book had a limited circulation; in a 1924 letter H.P. Lovecraft notes that he never saw an issue, and given his interest in supernatural horror he was exactly the sort of reader that the magazine would have been looking for. The men who put out Weird Tales may never have come across The Thrill Book. And it does make sense that there should be similarities between the magazines, just because they were doing something similar, and positioned themselves in similar ways in effectively the same marketplace. Weird Tales was more horror-oriented, more consistent (in my opinion) in quality and genre content, and ultimately more successful commercially and artistically; but the resemblance is clear.

It’s interesting to consider what might have happened if The Thrill Book had survived. Would Oliphant have guided it to new heights? Would it have turned more in the direction of fantasy and horror? Would it have overshadowed Weird Tales, or filled the gap in the marketplace that Weird Tales was trying to fill?

It might have made no difference. A number of Thrill Book writers went on to contribute to Weird Tales, including Greye La Spina, Francis Stevens (the pen name of Gertrude Barrows Bennett), and Seabury Quinn. Clark Ashton Smith had a poem in The Thrill Book. One story, “Crawling Hands” by P.A. Connolly, published in issues 6 and 7 of The Thrill Book, was given a minimal rewriting by Connolly and published in the eighth issue of Weird Tales (volume 2 number 4, November 1923) as “The Crawling Death.” (Lovecraft mentioned this in the aforementioned 1924 letter, tipped off by a friend of his; Baird apparently hadn’t known.) If The Thrill Book had survived, presumably Lovecraft would have seen it sooner or later, and would have submitted his fiction to it as he did to Weird Tales. It’s hard to imagine his work not being accepted. At Weird Tales he introduced other writers he knew to the magazine; very likely he’d have done the same in this alternate-universe version of The Thrill Book. Which is to say that had The Thrill Book survived, it probably would have turned into something that looked an awful lot like what Weird Tales became.

Either The Thrill Book would have done what Weird Tales would do, and so become the Weird Tales we know in all but name, or else it would have shifted focus to become something different and so left space in the market for Weird Tales, which then would have gone on as something like what it actually became. Either way, it looks like a magazine similar to Weird Tales was destined to emerge. I can think of a way things could have taken a particularly interesting direction, though. When Baird left Weird Tales, owner J.C. Hennerger offered editorship of the magazine to Lovecraft. He ultimately turned down the offer, because (in part) he didn’t want to move to what he viewed as the cultural wasteland of Chicago, where Weird Tales was headquartered. But The Thrill Book was published out of New York City. Had an occasion arisen in which Lovecraft was given a similar offer, would he have moved to New York, as he did in 1924 in this reality? Impossible to know. But an interesting speculation.

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.