100 Years of Weird Tales

Welcome to the 100th anniversary year of Weird Tales.

Weird Tales began in March 1923, and despite nearly perishing the following year, it went on for a total of 279 issues in its initial run, finally reaching its end in September 1954.

Marvin Kaye dubbed Weird Tales "the magazine that never dies," and so far he has been right. Weird Tales has passed from publisher to publisher, editor to editor, and--I believe--from license-holder to license-holder. Even today, there are new issues in print and being readied for print. Few magazine titles from 1923 can make such a claim.

I'll jump ahead and say that the original Weird Tales celebrated its 25th anniversary in March 1948 with a special issue and cover art by Lee Brown Coye. August Derleth and Seabury Quinn contributed essays of appreciation in the form of long letters to "The Eyrie," the regular letters column of the magazine. Derleth's Arkham House placed an advertisement congratulating Weird Tales on its quarter-century in print. The magazine reached its end six and a half years later, in September 1954, or exactly thirty one and a half years after its beginning.

In the 1960s, Leo Margulies edited four paperback anthologies of stories, mostly from the original Weird Tales. Margulies had purchased the Weird Tales property in the 1950s. His plans for a revived magazine never panned out, but at least we have these four very nice books, two with cover art by Virgil Finlay.

In the 1970s, Weird Tales returned with four pulp-sized issues edited by Sam Moskowitz. Finlay once again contributed a cover illustration, this one for the fiftieth-anniversary issue, or whole number 280.

More returns followed:

Lin Carter assembled four paperback-sized issues of a new Weird Tales in 1981-1983. Next came the two Bellerophon issues edited by Gordon M.D. Garb in 1984-1985. A more confused era began in 1988 and continues to this day. As far as I can tell, there was no 75th anniversary issue, which would have come in 1998.

Publication of Weird Tales hasn't been regular or continuous since 1988. Nonetheless, Weird Tales at the century mark is still in print and still recognizable as a pulp-style magazine. That's fitting, I guess, for a type of fiction that very often returns to the past for its themes and subject matter.

If you go to the Weird Tales website, you will see that whole issue number 365 is available for order and that number 366 is being prepared for publication. In other words, there is an issue for every day of the year, plus one for leap day.

Weird Tales #366 is to be a themed issue, one that has been in preparation for several years, I believe. The theme is sword and sorcery. Sword and sorcery as we know it didn't come along until a few years after the original Weird Tales began. Nonetheless, if number 366 comes out by March 2023, we'll accept it as the 100th anniversary issue and I hope be happy with its contents. Bob Eggleton is the cover artist. His illustration shows a white-haired warrior facing a Cthulhu-like monster. In that, Mr. Eggleton has married the two genres, science-fantasy and sword and sorcery--as well as the two authors, H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard--most closely identified with Weird Tales magazine. Both of course also included themes, devices, and subjects common in two additional genres, weird fiction and supernatural horror, in their work. The so-called "New Weird" is supposed to be a mix of various genres and sub-genres. Proponents of the "New Weird" should know that that kind of thing has been going on for a long time and in fact came long before Weird Tales. A good example is in "The Gold-Bug" by Edgar Allan Poe (1843), about whom I will soon have more to say.

So I will begin a series on 100 years of Weird Tales.

Weird Tales, First and Last

Weird Tales in its initial run began in March 1923 and ended in September 1954. From the start it called itself "The Unique Magazine." (The word unique appears again on the cover of the final issue.) And Weird Tales was indeed unique, being the first American magazine to devote itself to tales of fantasy, horror, and weird fiction. The first magazine of science fiction, Amazing Stories, came along three years later, in April 1926.

The cover on the left, by Richard R. Epperly, illustrates "Ooze," an "extraordinary novelette" by Anthony M. Rud. It features what I have called the eternal triangle of man, woman, and monster. "Ooze" is a science-fantasy and a kind of super-mystery or science-mystery. I wonder if it could have influenced H.P. Lovecraft in his composition of "The Call of Cthulhu" just three years later.

The images shown above are not quite at the same scale. According to Robert Weinberg in his history The Weird Tales Story (1977), the first issue of Weird Tales is only 6 by 9 inches, or about the dimensions of an octavo-sized book. The last issue, with cover art by Virgil Finlay, is digest-sized, or about 5-1/2 by 8-1/4 inches. Finlay's cover, by the way, is a reprint of an earlier cover from August 1939: by its end, Weird Tales seems to have been just scraping by--until it wasn't any more. Weird fiction is about the past, often about decay and descent. By 1954, the magazine was in a state of decay. But now here we are nearly seventy years later, and Weird Tales yet lives.

Revised on January 6, 2023.
Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley