Two Poems About Two Crows

Francis Hard, aka Farnsworth Wright, had a poem called "Two Crows" in the January 1925 issue of Weird Tales. Just six years earlier, Wright had been a soldier stationed in France. In composing his poem, he must have drawn on memories of the Great War:

Two Crows
By Francis Hard (Weird Tales, Jan. 1925)

Two crows flapped over dismally
(So wearily, so drearily)
To the blackened limb of a blasted tree;
The shells flew screaming overhead,
And the field was covered thick with dead--
The earth reeked with its dead.

One crow lamented to his mate
(So wearily, so drearily):
"How long, how long must we now wait
For the taste of food that was so good
Before the shrapnel shattered the wood
And loaded the ground with dead?

"The odor sweet of dying men"
(Lamented he so drearily),
"How strangely pleasant was it when
I sensed it first with ravished breath!
But I am sated, and sick to death,
And would fain lie yon with the dead."

A shell came moaning through the air
(So drearily, so eerily)
And burst where the crows were plaining there;
It shivered the wreck of the blasted tree,
And bits of crow fell bloodily
Among the tangled dead.

* * *

A year and a month later, in February 1926, in his capacity as editor, Wright placed a traditional ballad called "The Twa Corbies" ("The Two Crows") in Weird Tales:

The Twa Corbies
(Old Ballad)
[By Anonymous]

As I was walking all alane,
I heard twa corbies making a mane.
The tane unto the tother say:
Where sail we gang and dine today?

In behint yon auld fail dike
I wot there lies a new-slain knight.
Naebody kens that he lies there
But his hawk, his hound, and his lady fair.

His hound is to the hunting gone,
His hawk to fetch the wild-fowl hame,
His lady's ta'en another mate,
So we may mak our dinner sweet.

I'll sit on his white hause-bane,
Ye'll pick out his bonny blue een,
Wi' ae lock o' his gowden hair
We’ll theek our nest when it grows bare.

Mony a one for him makes mane,
But nane sail ken where he is gane.
O'er his white banes, when they are bare,
The wind sall blaw for evermair.

* * *

"The Twa Corbies" was first in print in 1812. A century later, it was reprinted in Ballads Weird and Wonderful (1912), illustrated by Vernon Hill (1887-1972). It seems to me that Farnsworth Wright had read "The Twa Corbies" and was inspired by it in writing his own poem. The refrain, the repeated "wearily," "drearily," and "eerily," would seem to have been inspired by "The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe and its own refrain of "evermore" and "nevermore," also from its opening line:

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,

I wrote about "The Twa Corbies" on December 19, 2022. You can read what I wrote by clicking here.

Two corvids on the cover of Weird Tales:

Weird Tales, July 1945, cover art by Lee Brown Coye.

Weird Tales, September 1939, cover art by Virgil Finlay.

And what might be a crow but looks more like a myna:

Weird Tales, January 1946, cover art by Albert Roanoke Tilburne.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Francis Hard (1888-1940)

Pseudonym of Farnsworth Wright
Author, Editor, Poet, Journalist, Translator, Soldier
Born July 29, 1888, Santa Barbara, California
Died June 12, 1940, Manhattan, New York, New York

Francis Hard was Farnsworth Wright. He used that pseudonym while writing stories and poems for magazines of which he was the editor. You could call it a conflict of interest for an editor to place his own works in a publication that he edits. I don't see it that way. An editor should have someone else look at his story or poem before putting it into print. He should also accept "No" or "It needs work" in response. But I think it's okay for an editor to publish his own work, even under his own name. Farnsworth Wright wrote as Francis Hard anyway.

Farnsworth Wright was born on July 29, 1888, in Santa Barbara, California, to George Francis Wright (1848-1892), a civil engineer and a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, and Genevieve Hard Wright (1850-1914), a soprano singer and music teacher and an instructor in physical culture. And so already we have an origin for Wright's nom de plume, Francis Hard.

According to his World War I draft card, Farnsworth Wright attended the University of Nevada, where he began his military service. Wright also studied journalism at the University of Washington. (See his yearbook picture below.) His father had served before him in the U.S. Navy. They were descended from Samuel Farnsworth of Groton, Massachusetts, a drummer in Captain Joseph Moor's Company, Colonel William Prescott's Regiment of Massachusetts Militia during the Revolutionary War. Samuel Farnsworth enlisted on May 15, 1775, or less than a month after the war had commenced at Lexington and Concord. He was presumably at the Battle of Bunker Hill less than a month later. On November 9, 1910, the Colorado Society of the Sons of the American Revolution approved Farnsworth Wright's application for membership. Less than eight years later, on September 9, 1918, Private Farnsworth Wright of Company H, 342nd Infantry Regiment, 86th Infantry Division--the Blackhawk Division--shipped out from New York to France aboard the Minnekahda, continuing the Farnsworth and Wright families' records of service to their country.

Wright returned to the United States on August 4, 1919. He had been promoted by then to sergeant. During and after the Great War, Wright had served as a translator in France and I believe in occupied Germany. Before, based in Chicago, he had worked as a newspaper reporter for Musical America Company of New York. He was also, oddly enough, an Esperantist. Music, languages, and culture seem to have come naturally to members of the Wright family.

Farnsworth Wright returned stateside in the same year that Jacob C. Henneberger, late of the U.S. Navy, arrived in Indianapolis. Henneberger also had connections in Chicago. In 1922 (or thereabouts), he formed The Rural Publishing Corporation with a former college classmate, John M. Lansinger. In one way or another, Farnsworth Wright met Henneberger and Lansinger. Wright had a short story, "The Closing Hand," in the first issue of their new magazine, Weird Tales, in March 1923. He had other submissions after that and began working as a reader of manuscripts at some point. Weird Tales and the business behind it foundered in mid-1924. When it came back in November of that year, Farnsworth Wright was full editor. It was then that he began using the name Francis Hard. As Hard, he had five poems and a short story in Weird Tales, plus one story each in it companion titles Oriental Stories and The Magic Carpet Magazine, which were really the same magazine with successively different titles.

Francis Hard's career as an author and a poet lasted almost as long as Farnsworth Wright's did as editor. Wright remained in his post until 1940, the year in which he died at age fifty-one. He was buried at Willamette National Cemetery in Oregon. His widow, Marjorie Jeanette Zinkie Wright (1893-1974), joined him there the year after her death.

Francis Hard's Stories & Poems in Weird Tales, Oriental Stories, and The Magic Carpet Magazine
(All were in Weird Tales unless otherwise noted.)
"The Great Panjandrum" (short story; Nov. 1924)
"Two Crows" (poem; Jan. 1925)
"The Dark Pool" (poem; Apr. 1925)
"The Death Angel" (poem; Sept. 1925)
"The Evening Star" (poem; Mar. 1926)
"The White Queen" in Oriental Stories (short story; Nov. 1930)
"The Picture of Judas" in The Magic Carpet Magazine (short story; Apr. 1933)
"After Two Nights of the Ear-Ache" (poem; Oct. 1937)

Above, the University of Washington yearbook pictures of Farnsworth Wright (1888-1940) and his future wife, Marjorie Zinkie (1893-1974), from the 1913-1914 school year. Marjorie Zinkie studied to be a librarian and worked in that capacity in Idaho, Michigan, and Washington State. Together the Wrights had a son, Robert Farnsworth Wright (1930-1993). He and his wife, Ruthora Marie McBride Wright (1930-1993), died within five months of each other in 1993. I can't say whether Farnsworth and Marjorie Wright have any living descendants.

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Jessie Bond (1894-1991)

Jessie C. Bond Munroe
Aka Bonnie Bee, Bonnie Bond, Bonnie Munroe
Fashion Artist, Illustrator, Poet, Painter
Born January 4, 1894, Decatur, Illinois
Died January 20, 1991, Palm Beach County, Florida

She was born in January, married in January, and died in January, and so in January I will write about artist and poet Jessie Bond. She was born on January 4, 1894, in Decatur, Illinois. Her father, William Branham Bond (1853-1913), was a millwright. Younger than her husband by a generation, Jessie's mother, Flora Etta (Williams) Bond (1871-1949), was a solicitor of public houses and later kept boarders. (Maybe those two things are the same.) Jessie Bond lived in and received her schooling in Decatur, Illinois, and St. Louis, Missouri. By 1920, she and her mother were in Indianapolis. Flora Bond lived on Massachusetts Avenue in that census year. In 1930, she resided on 30th Street, just west of Meridian Avenue. By then her daughter had gone far from home and would soon be herself a mother.

Jessie Bond is someone new to me. Her last name is in Jaffery & Cook's Collector's Index to Weird Tales. I found her first name in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database. Jessie Bond had six known illustrations in Weird Tales, from December 1924 to March 1925. These were in Farnsworth Wright's first half-year as editor of the magazine. I pretty quickly found an artist named Jessie Bond who lived in Florida. But was she the same Jessie Bond? What could her connection have been to Weird Tales? Then I found that Jessie Bond had moved to Florida in late 1924 from Indianapolis. I also found that she had studied at the John Herron School of Art in that same city. Remember that the editorial offices of Weird Tales magazine were in Indianapolis from 1923 to 1926. Weird Tales and Farnsworth Wright had addresses in the Circle City during those years, and they found artists among its residents, including William F. Heitman and George O. Olinick. Jessie Bond was one of them, too.

To start again, Jessie Bond went to school in St. Louis. In 1918-1919, she studied at the John Herron School of Art in Indianapolis. (One of her classmates was Hoosier cartoonist Russell Berg [1901-1966].) Jessie worked as a staff artist at the William H. Block Company department store in Indianapolis. Founded in 1874 by an Austro-Hungarian immigrant, Wilhelm Herman Bloch (1855-1928), the Wm. H. Block Co., or Block's, was a mainstay in downtown Indianapolis for many decades. I remember going there with my mother when we were children. Maybe that was the first time I ever rode in an elevator. I remember full-page, hand-drawn fashion advertisements for Block's clothing in the Indianapolis Star. These were a mainstay, too. The Block's building, located at the corner of Illinois and Market streets, was designed by architects Vonnegut & Bohn, the Vonnegut part for Kurt Vonnegut, Sr. (1884-1957). He was the father of author Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (1922-2007), who found success early on in the pages of slick magazines and probably never had to turn to the pulps for income. I wouldn't rule out that he read Weird Tales as a child. I wonder if he knew that "The Unique Magazine" had originated in the city of his birth.

About the time that October turned into November 1924, Jessie Bond moved from Indianapolis to Miami, Florida. She must have been joyous in her move from a midwestern November to an eternal far southern summer. In a contemporaneous newspaper feature article, she was quoted as saying, "I find that I go at my work here with a different spirit. Miami is a playground, and that spirit seems to unconsciously enter into one, until one ceases to take even work seriously, and one does it more for the joy of accomplishment."

By the time she moved, Jessie must have already established a connection to Farnsworth Wright and Weird Tales. He was brand new as editor in November 1924. She had one or two drawings in each issue from December 1924 until March 1925, including two in the January 1925 issue. One of these was for "The Specter Priestess of Wrightstone" by Herman F. Wright. Herman F. Wright is an unknown author. I wonder now if he was actually Farnsworth Wright--F. Wright--in disguise. Wright had another work, a poem called "Two Crows," in that same issue. This was published under his pseudonym Francis Hard.

For five years Jessie Bond worked as a fashion artist for William M. Burdine's Sons department store in Miami. She also conducted the fashion page at the Miami Herald for one season. On January 11, 1928, she married New York native Robert Morris "Bob" Munroe (1896-1971) in Broward County, Florida. He worked as a newspaper columnist and as the director of advertising and publicity for the city of Coral Gables. Their son, John Macgregor Munroe, Ph.D., born on February 2, 1931, died just three years and three months ago, on November 4, 2021, at age ninety. He was a musician, educator, and choir director. He named one of his own daughters Bonnie, presumably after her grandmother . . .

Bob Munroe was a humorist and poet. His wife was a poet, too. Jessie Bond wrote under a pen name, "Bonnie Bee." She was also called Bonnie Bond and Bonnie Munroe, and she had poems in the New York World, the Tampa Morning Tribune, and Florida Poets--1931, edited by Henry Harrison. Bob and Jessie Munroe were acquainted with Vivian Yeiser Laramore (1892-1975), the first and only female poet laureate of the State of Florida. Vivian wrote about both of them in her column "Miami Muse," about Florida poets, in the Miami Daily News. Imagine a time when there was poetry in newspapers and a newspaper column was devoted every week to poets and their work.

After the birth of her son, Jessie became a portrait painter. She liked to collect seashells, and she loved the subtropics of Florida and the Bahamas. She seems to have lived in Florida for the rest of her blessedly long life. Jessie C. Bond Munroe died on January 20, 1991, in Palm Beach County, Florida. She was ninety-seven years old.

Jessie Bond's Illustrations in Weird Tales
"Fairy Gossamer" by Harry Harrison Kroll (Dec. 1924)
"Phantoms" by Laurence R. D'Orsay (Jan. 1925)
"The Specter Priestess of Wrightstone" by Herman F. Wright (Jan. 1925)
"An Unclaimed Reward" by Strickland Gillilan (Feb. 1925)
"The Magic of Dai Nippon" by J.U. Giesy (Feb. 1925)
"Black Curtains" by G. Frederick Montefiore (Mar. 1925)

(Of the six authors listed above, two--Harry Harrison Kroll and Strickland Gillilan--can be classed as Hoosiers. If Herman F. Wright was Farnsworth Wright, then that would make three. The FictionMags Index lists another credit for Jessie Bond, illustrations for "New Stories of Gilbert and Sullivan," with Rupert D'Oyly Carte, J. M. Gordon, Isabel Jay, Henry A. Lytton, and Courtice Pounds, published in The Strand Magazine in December 1925.)

Further Reading

• "Business Girls Sound Praises of Work and Recreation in Miami" by Isabel Stone, The Herald (Miami, Florida), November 15, 1924, page 4-B.

• "Miami Muse: A Weekly Column Devoted to Florida's Poets" by Vivian Yeiser Laramore, Miami Daily News, March 26, 1933, Society Section, page 11.

• "Miami Muse: A Weekly Column Devoted to Florida's Poets" by Vivian Yeiser Laramore, Miami Daily News, September 22, 1935, page 7, which includes some of her poems.

• "Gables Artist Plays Role of Santa To Give Orphan Long-Sought Lessons" by Judy Whitney Malone, Miami Daily News, December 15, 1939, page 19. 

Jessie Bond Munroe, aka Bonnie Munroe, in a newspaper photo accompanying the feature article "Gables Artist Plays Role of Santa To Give Orphan Long-Sought Lessons" by Judy Whitney Malone, in the Miami Daily News, December 15, 1939, page 19.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Armstrong Livingston (1885-1948)

Robert Armstrong Livingston, Jr.

Author, Businessman

Born August 16, 1885, New York, New York,

Died February 7, 1948, Manhattan, New York, New York

Robert Armstrong "Ray" Livingston, Jr., known as a writer as Armstrong Livingston, was born on August 16, 1885, in New York City. His father was Robert Armstrong Livingston, Sr. (1854-1913), a New York State assemblyman. Both were part of an old and very prominent family in New York State. Among their relatives were the Roosevelts.

Armstrong Livingston was educated at St. George's School in Newport, Rhode Island. He worked in the insurance business but was more well known as an author, mostly of mystery and detective stories. His story "As Obligated" in the January 1925 issue of Weird Tales was his only one for that magazine. He had dozens of others in All-Story Weekly, Clues, Detective Story Magazine, Gaiety, Metropolitan, Saucy Romantic Adventures, and other titles from 1918 to 1945. From 1922 to 1945, he published at least sixteen books:

• The Mystery of the Twin Rubies (1922)
• On the Right Wrists (1925)
• The Ju-Ju Man (1926) (with Thomas K. Griffiths), originally serialized in Argosy Allstory Weekly beginning June 17, 1922.
• Light-Fingered Ladies: A Detective Story (1927), originally serialized in Detective Story Magazine beginning August 14, 1926.
• The Guilty Accuser (1928)
• The Monk of Hambleton (1928)
• The Doublecross (1929)
• The Monster in the Pool (1929), originally serialized in Detective Story Magazine beginning January 21, 1928.
• Trackless Death (1929)
• The Murder Trap (1930)
• In Cold Blood (1931)
• Murder Is Easy (1933)
• Magic for Murder (1936)
• Night of Crime (1938)
• The Murdered and the Missing (non-fiction; 1947) (with John G. Stein)
• The Case of the Walking Corpse (1945)

On April 23, 1911, Livingston married Gladys Patten Grover in New York. He and they lived in Cuba, Bermuda, Algiers, Nice, Monaco, and other places. They later divorced. On December 30, 1926, Livingston remarried. His new wife was Ruth Stevens Dorr.

Livingston's life was short. He died on February 7, 1948, in Manhattan, at age sixty-two. He was buried at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York.

Armstrong Livingston's Story in Weird Tales
"As Obligated" (Jan. 1925)

Further Reading
Look on the Internet for discussions of Livingston's mystery and detective novels.

Magic for Murder by Armstrong Livingston, "A Cavalcade Book," No. 2, date of publication and cover artist unknown. 

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales in 1925

Happy New Year to Readers of Weird Tales!

I finished up last year by writing about the one-hundredth anniversary issue of Weird Tales, published in 2023. I will have more on that issue and some ideas connected to it, but I would like to write about other things for a while and get away from that dreary parade.

The first issue of Weird Tales was published in March 1923, thus the first calendar year of "The Unique Magazine" was not a full one. There were only eight issues published in 1923. Weird Tales almost came to an end in its second year. There was a three-month gap during which there weren't any issues published at all, and so only seven appeared in 1924.

Nineteen twenty-five was different, for that was the first full year of Weird Tales, with issues in every month. Twelve more full years would follow, making thirteen dozen issues in all during those years. Nineteen thirty-eight, during which Weird Tales was purchased by Short Stories, Inc., was the last full year of the magazine. I doubt there will ever be another. We just don't have it in us to write enough good stories or to publish and purchase enough issues for that to happen. That's a shame, I think, but not really necessary.

The January 1925 issue has a science-fiction or science-fantasy cover. Illustrating "Invaders from Outside" by J. Schossel (Joseph H. Schlossel [1902-1977]), it may have been the first magazine cover of any kind to show pointy-eared space aliens. Schlossel's aliens, drawn by cover artist Andrew Brosnatch (1896-1965) (below), look suspiciously like the gray aliens of flying saucer folklore--or vice versa. As I have said before, aliens and their spaceships must be imagined before they can be seen.

That January issue was the first to have letters in response to the return of Weird Tales in November 1924, this under its new editor, Farnsworth Wright. "The Eyrie," subtitled in the table of contents as "A Chat with the Readers," included letters from seven readers. At least four of those readers were also writers of fiction, three of them for Weird Tales. "The Eyrie" is no longer a place for readers to let their ideas and opinions be heard. Instead it's one in which the editor gets to hear himself talk, I guess because he likes so much the sound of his own voice, even when he doesn't have anything very interesting to say.

There were other developments in the magazine world in 1925. On February 21 of that year, The New Yorker, a quintessential slick magazine, made its debut. The New Yorker has been published continuously since then. Weird Tales of course has not been. Weird Tales was originally a pulp magazine but is now also a slick. The New Yorker is a far cry better than the current Weird Tales, which is really just Weird Tales in name only, with a few of its former trappings still in place. I'm not sure which magazine has come down more in the world.

Like Weird Tales, President Calvin Coolidge got his start in 1923. On March 4, 1925, he was inaugurated into his first and only full term as president. The 1920s would thereafter gallop to a close, which you could say came a little early, in late October 1929 when the stock market crashed. During those years, Weird Tales was reaching its peak. The style of the 1920s and '30s was Art Deco, one that got its name after an exposition that opened in Paris on April 29, 1925. The Art Deco style made its way into Weird Tales, too, for example in the art of Hugh Rankin ( 1878-1956). In between those two events, on April 10, 1925, the culture of the 1920s put forth an exemplar of its literature in F. Scott Fitzgerald's great novel, The Great Gatsby. The Great Gatsby has its detractors. I'm not one of them. I have read The Great Gatsby three or four times. I am astonished at how modern it is, even after a century, and how radically different it must have been from some of the stuffy literature of its time. I can't say that Fitzgerald or Hemingway, Faulkner or Dos Passos, had any influence at all on the men and women who wrote for Weird Tales, but I'm not sure they could have avoided the effects of living in the great and roaring milieux of the 1920s.

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!
From The Parisienne Monthly Magazine, January 1916.

Terence E. Hanley December 31, 2024-January 1, 2025

Art in the Cosmic Horror Issue

Most of the art used in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales is unsigned. I presume it to be the work of the design director, Jeff Wong. I believe this is the same Jeff Wong who has worked in television and feature film animation, as well as in product design. If this is he, then all of this fits the pattern in Weird Tales #367, which is that the contributors to this issue are mostly movie, television, and comic book people and not primarily writers or illustrators of prose fiction. Jeff Wong has his own website. He lives in Pasadena, California.

Most of the art here appears to be digital. One exception is the cover art by Mike Mignola. Mr. Mignola's original art is for sale on line. In looking at an image, I see that it is real art on paper, drawn in the dimensions of a comic book page. I see also that his design has been expanded to more nearly squarish dimensions for the audiobook version of this issue. If I had to guess, I would say this was done so that the audiobook version has the same dimensions as a record album cover.

There are other illustrations in the interior. Five are previous covers of Weird Tales, from the original run of the magazine, 1923 to 1954, including one by Joseph Clemens Gretter, aka Gretta (1904-1988). He was a fellow Hoosier. He also assisted on or ghosted Ripley's Believe It or Not!  I mentioned Robert Ripley the other day. The only other interior illustration that is not a Weird Tales cover or a new work is an uncredited illustration of the Pied Piper of Hamelin.

That lack of giving credit to artists is and always has been a problem. An artist is a creator equal to (or even greater than, in commercial terms) an author or poet. Not crediting artists for their work should be a crime. Being an artist, I admit my bias.

I wouldn't rule out that some or all of the digital works in Weird Tales #367 were actually created by artificial intelligence or AI. As an artist of real works on paper, which are created by the human mind, heart, and hand, I have to object to AI-created artwork. But the world seems to be rushing towards AI. The dinosaurs, Luddites, and Jeremiahs among us are not going to stop that from happening.

At least two of these presumably digital illustrations incorporate images created by others. One is a television screenshot of actor John Mills in the British show Quatermass (1979). I neglected to mention that the plot of that show involves the harvesting of human beings by outer-space aliens. As in other stories in the Cosmic Horror Issue, this idea--that we are property--is Fortean.

The other sampled image is of the painting Christina's World by Andrew Wyeth (1948). That one accompanies another story in which an alien presence, originating in the Void, exploits humanity.

Finally, there is one illustration that refers to the work of another artist or designer. This is the final illustration in the magazine, a takeoff on the Nirvana album cover Nevermind (1991). I wrote about that the other day, too.

Here and Hereafter by Ruth Montgomery (Fawcett Crest, 1969). The cover artist is unknown. This is obviously an homage to Christina's World by Andrew Wyeth. You might also call it a swipe from Wyeth's work. And maybe it's a swipe of Frank Frazetta's cover illustration of Kavin's World by David Mason, also published in 1969. But then Frazetta's cover may also have been a swipe of a comic book cover by Malcolm Kildale, from 1941. You can see those images by clicking here.

I'll close by once again pointing out that there are pyramids on the cover of the first-anniversary issue of Weird Tales, from May-June-July 1924, and there are pyramids here in (almost) the last entry I have on the 100th-anniversary issue of May (supposedly) 2023.

Text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley