The flag of the United States of America, with 48 stars at top and with 50 at bottom.
This post is the fourth in a series reflecting on the world of 1923, and the 1920s generally, as a background to early issues of Weird Tales. Imagine that you’re an American 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 will you see?
You might, for example, see a flagpole with an American flag on it. It is a flag with a regular grid of stars in the corner, six rows of eight stars apiece, representing the 48 states of the Union. The United States in 1923 is a different place from what it will become a hundred years later, with a population that is distributed differently, different territories, a different self-image and different ideas about the nature of its peoples.
Weird Tales, April 1923
The table of contents of the second issue of Weird Tales advertises “Sixteen thrilling short stories / Two complete novelettes / Two two-part stories / Interesting, odd, and weird happenings.” More specifically, one of the two-part stories, the cover story, begins this month while the other concludes. As for the “interesting, odd, and weird happenings,” I wrote about them here, so now let’s get to the fiction. (Note that discussion of one of these stories necessitates quoting an ethnic slur, directed against the French, of all people.)
The first of the tales on offer in this issue is one of the novelettes, “The Scar,” by Carl Ramus (whose surname’s misspelled in the table of contents as ‘Rasmus’). It’s the only known published story by Ramus, though his sister Sybla was a writer whose work would later appear in Weird Tales. Carl Ramus had a day job as a doctor, and as it happens “The Scar” is a tale of a dashing young doctor pulled into a kidnapping plot. It’s not a terrible story, but it’s a surprising choice to lead off the issue as there’s little supernatural about it — the heroine claims to be able to bring on a fever by willing it and the hero believes he has a knack for hypnotism — and nothing I can see as ‘weird’ in any other sense. If the magazine’s still in the process of defining itself, then editor Edwin Baird has a different sense of where he intends it to go than we might expect from our later perspective.
The Issue at Hand, by William Atheling, Jr., AKA James Blish (Advent: Publishers, 1964). Cover by Jon Stopa
In 1952, a science fiction fanzine, Sky Hook, began publishing a series of critical essays by William Atheling, Jr. When its publisher, Redd Boggs, suspended publication, the science fiction writer James Blish publicly revealed that this was a pseudonym he had adopted. But a few years later, he revived “Atheling” for more criticism, published in another fanzine, Axe.
In 1964, Advent: Publishers collected his critical writings, including both fanzine articles and addresses given at science fiction conventions under his own name, as The Issue at Hand, credited to Atheling, “edited and with an introduction by James Blish,” though the book made no secret of the author’s identity. In 1970, a second collection appeared, More Issues at Hand.
This post is the third in a series reflecting on the world of 1923, and the 1920s generally, as a background to early issues of Weird Tales. Imagine that you’re an American 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 will you see?
Walk down a city street and you’ll observe other people around you, meaning you’ll see the fashions of the time. Any given era has its characteristic clothes and hairstyles, and the nineteen-twenties are no exception. Interesting to me personally are the reasons behind the adoption of specific fashions, and what they have to say about the way the world is changing. I’m writing these background posts as though one aspect of the 1920s can be divided from the others, but the truth is that then as now everything’s mashed together. Fashion’s affected by technology and politics, by ideas about formality and ideas about sexuality; and it can create images that will, for later years, define its moment.
Battleborn magazine, issue 1 (Iron Age Media, , May 31, 2026). Cover by Samuel Dillon
This is a man’s, man’s, man’s world
— James Brown
One blustery Maine spring day, I blew off class to spend an hour hanging out with a friend in the math department’s student lounge. Picture a Coke welded to my hand and a coffee to hers, as we discussed fantasy and science fiction and divers other subjects in the “wrong” lounge (we were English majors, but it was the English/Math Building and the math lounge was empty. What can I say?). Picture my friend as the reason I figured out I’m a feminist a lot sooner than I would have otherwise. Picture the talk turning to men, a gender to which only one of us is attracted.
“I’m fine with men,” she said. Then she said something I hadn’t heard before, but have heard other women echo many times since: “I just want them to remember women hold up half the sky.”
The second issue of Weird Tales, on sale from March of 1923 through to April, looked much like the first: a pulp magazine roughly 6 and a half inches by 9 and a half, with 192 pages. The April issue was .75 of an inch shorter and half an inch narrower. 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. Although to phrase it that way may be misleading; John Locke, in The Thing’s Incredible! The Secret Origins of Weird Tales, argues that what is referred to as the April/May 1923 issue of Detective Tales was actually an issue that came out in May which the publisher retroactively dated as a bimonthly issue, and if that’s so then there was no Detective Tales issue in April for the second issue of Weird Tales to parallel.
Either way, 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.
This post is the second in a series reflecting on the world of 1923 as a background to early issues of Weird Tales. Imagine that you’re an American in February of 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 will you see?
Probably the first thing you’ll notice as you set out into the street is the street itself, and its contents. The motor car has begun to change urban life. Since Ford introduced the Model T fifteen years ago the price has steadily dropped; there were almost 11 million registered passenger automobiles in the United States by the end of 1922, and will be just shy of 13.5 million by the end of 1923. Cars are registered, incidentally, and license plates have been required since 1918, but most states do not issue driver’s licenses; half the states will require licenses by 1930, and as late as 1935 only 39 states will mandate licenses and not many of those will require passing a test. In 1923 Model Ts are still the most common make of car, though competing models are about to cut into its sales. Famously, you can get a Model T in any colour, so long as it’s black; Ford used to offer a range of colours, but in 1914 streamlined production by cutting back to a particular type of black paint that was cheap and fast-drying. Model Ts do not at this time have shock absorbers, windshield wipers, rear view mirrors, bumpers, or an instrument panel for a speedometer (not a standard feature) or gas gauge.
Amazing Stories, August-September 1933, cover by Leo Morey
This week starts a brief period where these explorations are going to be shorter, for many of these authors have little biographical information available.
In the 1972 anthology Clarion II, Damon Knight included an essay entitled “Goodbye, Henry J. Kostkos, Goodbye,” using the author, along with J. Harvey Haggard, as an example of an author he once read and was invested in, but whose name no longer meant anything to modern readers. At the time, both Kostkos and Haggard were alive (Haggard would be alive for another 29 years).
Henry J. Kostkos was born on June 11, 1900.
Kostkos and his wife, Mary, had two children, Miriam and Maureen. Kostkos worked for Western Electric as an electrical engineer as well as for Bell Labs in Chicago and Ohio. He worked on display mechanisms developed by Bell Labs for their associated telephone companies. At various times, he ran his own contracting business in New York and in Chicago.
Uncanny Magazine cover collage Year 13 (issues 67, 68, and 72). Covers by Paul Lewin, Katy Shuttleworth, and Galen Dara.
This wasn’t my original plan for this guest post. The day before writing this, I was interviewed for the Functional Nerds podcast. During the interview, cohost Tracy Townsend brought up my recent Uncanny Magazine editorial where I said, “Nobody would call a yearly referendum about whether or not your business should exist a stress-free process.” Tracy wanted to know why I kept doing this if that’s the case.
Weird Tales volume 1 number 1 boasts 26 separate pieces of fiction, one of which is continued in the next issue. As you’d expect from an anthology, some stories are better than others. None reach the heights of the fiction the magazine would publish later. But a few are at least interesting in their own right.
I’m going to look here at each story, which means this post is going to run long. After I’m done going piece-by-piece, I’ll write about the collective effect of the issue, and how it reads as a whole. But there are over 100,000 words of fiction to discuss before I get there.
Three of the longest pieces lead off the issue. The second story is the cover feature, and the third story’s the first part of the serial. The opener, though, is “The Dead Man’s Tale,” by Willard E. Hawkins. So the first story of the first issue of Weird Tales lets us know right in its title to expect the unexpected: here dead men do tell tales. …
