Weird Tales, June 1923, front and back coversThe fourth issue of Weird Tales, dated June 1923, keeps the same format as the issue previous — starting with the large bedsheet size, about 9 inches by 12. The trade dress of the cover is the same, with the same logo. The design of the cover, with a splash of red in which one story is advertised in black writing, is the same. Unfortunately, the actual cover art, by regular Weird Tales artist William Heitman, isn’t very good.
There’s a lady, there’s an ape, and the latter seems to have surprised the former in her room. The majority of Weird Tales readers were likely able to place the image at once as a scene from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders In the Rue Morgue,” which is reprinted this issue. The problem is that it’s not a particularly evocative image, and the poses of the characters seem odd at first glance and make less sense the more you look at them.
Richard Tooker was born in Farina, Illinois on July 3, 1902 to George Lattimer Tooker and Laura J. (nee Switzer) Tooker. His family eventually left the small town of 600 people to move to North Dakota and also lived in Minneapolis.
After graduating from prep school, he took a job as an editor of Westerns before serving for two years as a private in the U.S. Marine Corps during the 1920s. As with many authors he worked a variety of jobs, including as a musician, journalist, cowboy, railroad clerk, bank clerk, and a farmer. By the 1930s, he had settled in Phoenix, which would be his permanent home.
His first short story was “Planet Paradise,” published as by Dick Presley Tooker was written when he was only fifteen, but did not appear until the February 1924 issue of Weird Tales. His only other publication in the 1920s was the novel The Day of the Brown Horde, published by Payson & Clarke in 1929. It would be reviewed in both Amazing Stories and Wonder Stories and later an excerpt would be reprinted in Famous Fantastic Mysteries.
Robert Arthur, Jr. was born on November 10, 1909 at Fort Mills on Corregidor in the Phillipines to Robert Jay Arthur and Sarah Abbie (nee Fee). His father was a Lieutenant stationed there at the time. As his father was stationed in various places, Arthur grew up on the movie, in Massachusetts, Michigan, Kansas, and Virginia. He attended Hampton High School in Virginia and was elected Senior Class President.
Although accepted to West Point, Arthur chose not to follow in his father’s footsteps, instead enrolling at the College of William and Mary. After his sophomore year, he transferred to the University of Michigan, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in English in 1930. Following graduation, he worked briefly as an editor for Munsey Publications before returning to work toward his Master of Arts in Journalism, which he received from Michigan in 1932.
After earning his Master’s, Arthur moved to Greenwich Village and began writing stories for the pulp magazines, appearing in Wonder Stories, The Shadow, Argosy Weekly, Unknown Worlds, Black Mask, and more. He also worked for Dell Magazines as an editor and as an associate editor for Photo-Story.
The new format Weird Tales adopted for its third issue reached right into the table of contents, which dropped from two pages to one, with of necessity a more cramped layout. One extremely short story isn’t listed, but the magazine makes sure to promote “Nineteen Thrilling Short Stories” along with “Two Complete Novelettes.” That’s actually an increase over the last issue, which had sixteen short stories and two novelettes. So, having discussed the format in a previous post, let’s now look closely at this issue’s fiction.
And it is necessary with this issue to talk about race in Weird Tales, starting with the first story in the magazine (so this post will include quotations and mentions of period racism). “The Moon Terror,” by A.G. Birch, is promoted by a cover blurb; it’s 30,000 words long, 20,000 of which appear in this issue, with the conclusion in the next month’s magazine. It’s a textbook example of Yellow Peril racism, in which sinister East Asians menace white people and the Western world. In this case, the villains are a secret Chinese society who threaten the planet as a whole with increasingly powerful earthquakes.
Margaret Irwin was born on March 27, 1889 in Highgate Hill, London to Andrew Clarke and Anna Julia (nee Baker) Irwin. Her father was originally from Perth, Australia. After her mother’s death in 1899 and her father’s death in 1902, Irwin was sent to be raised by her uncle, Sidney T. Irwin, a classics professor at Clifton College in Bristol. She was educated at Clifton High School in Bristol and went on to study at Oxford, where she took a degree in English. Her uncle died in 1911.
Irwin’s earliest novel, How Many Miles to Babylon, was published in 1913 and was followed by a couple more novels in the teens before she hit her stride in the 1920s. Her 1924 novel Still She Wished for Company was a fantasy novel in which an occultist drew the heroine into 1779. It was followed a year later by These Mortals about a woman raised in isolation in a magical palace. Although she continued to, occasionally write short fiction with fantastic elements, such as “Monsieur Seeks a Wife” and “The Curate and the Rake,” the majority of her writing was historical fiction, for which she became well known.
I am back again with more internet drama that I believe is all interconnected and all very much related to the current literacy crisis we are suffering. This time, it’s all about skimming. Specially, the revelation that all these social media “readers” are actually just skipping to the dialogue and reading only that. Let’s dive into this little nugget, shall we?
A postcard showing an early-20th century Horne & Hardart automatThis is the fifth post in a series reflecting on the world of the 1920s as a background for discussing the early issues of Weird Tales. Imagine that you’re an American in a big city in 1923, and you’re taking a walk to the newsstand to buy the first issue of a new pulp fiction magazine. What sort of things might you see? What do those things suggest about ways people think? What do they say about the stories they tell?
Let’s say you get hungry as you walk along, and think about getting some food later. Maybe you see a restaurant, and a grocery store near it. What kind of food will you be able to buy in the store? And what sort of a restaurant are you looking at? There are a lot of potential answers to that second question, but I want to focus on one admittedly unusual possibility. If you’re in the right city, especially New York or Philadelphia, maybe you have the chance to pop into an automat. And in New York, you might even spot a future Weird Tales writer drinking the hot chocolate.
John Lymington was born on April 21, 1911 in London, England. His birth name was John Richard Newton Chance. His father was Dick Chance, who served as the managing editor of Amalgamated Press. Raised in London, he attended a private school and then went on to technical college with the intention of becoming a civil engineer or quantity surveyor (insert Ethel the Aardvark). Instead, by 1932, he decided to work full time as a writer.
He learned to fly in 1928 and during World War II served as a flight instructor for the Royal Air Force, based out of the Cotswolds. He served there, overseeing training at three different airfields until 1943, when he was given indefinite leave and eventually invalided out of the service as a flight lieutenant. Around the time he was put on leave, he met Shirley Savill, who was serving as a WAAF section officer and the two married on July 22, 1943. Following the war, they settled in Hampshire, where they had three sons. By 1956, they had moved to the Isle of Wight, where Lymington managed a pub.
Weird Tales, May 1923, front and back coversThe third issue of Weird Tales saw the magazine experiment with a significant change in presentation. The first two issues had been a standard pulp size, about 6 inches by 9; the May 1923 issue went to the bedsheet format, a bit more than 9 inches by 12, while cutting the number of pages from 192 to 120. Open the issue, or look through a pdf file, and further changes become apparent.
The layout’s gone to three columns of text instead of two. There are two reprints in the issue, one of them printed at a reduced type size, presumably to fit the space available. And the magazine boasts interior artwork for the first time, with nine stories getting uncredited illustrations; black-and-white line drawings, usually with heavy hatching and cross-hatching.
The artist was presumably this issue’s cover artist, William Heitman, who seems to have done all the interior artwork in Weird Tales’ first year. Heitman’s two-colour cover image is simple, bordering on crude, but conveys a mood. The blurb on the cover is for A. G. Birch’s “The Moon Terror,” though there’s nothing in the story like the picture, for reasons which we’ll come to later on in this post. The colour scheme of the cover’s similar to the last issue, with solid red and black, but the logo’s the third in three issues — though the magazine’s subhead, “The Unique Magazine,” has remained consistent.
T.P. Caravan was born Charles Carroll Muñoz on July 2, 1926 in the Bronx, New York. His parents were O.A. and Constance (née Stoutenburgh) Muñoz.
During World War II, Muñoz served in the United States Navy as an aerial gunner, flying in Avenger bombers. When the war was over, he remained in the U.S. Merchant Marines, serving as a radio officer on freighters, tankers, and passenger ships. He also served during both the Korean and Vietnam Wars on munitions ships.
He earned his Master’s degree from Columbia in 1953 with a thesis about the eighteen century English poet Edward Young. In 1952, while attending Columbia University, he began publishing science fiction under the Caravan name with the short story “Happy Solution,” which appeared in the January issue of Other Worlds. Several other science fiction stories followed over the next thirteen years, including seven sequels to “Happy Solution.”
