What's in a Title?-Part One

Weird Tales

Weird Tales was the brainchild of Jacob Clark Henneberger (1890-1969), a native Pennsylvanian who arrived in Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1919 after having served in the U.S. Navy during the Great War. Alternating between there and Chicago over the next few years--no one now can be sure of his movements--Henneberger founded, with his business partner John  M. Lansinger (1892-1963), the Rural Publishing Corporation in 1922. Detective Tales came first. Fans of Weird Tales often forget that. The first issue of that very early detective magazine was dated October 1, 1922. Weird Tales came along a few months later, in March 1923.

J.C. Henneberger was long a fan of what we now call weird fiction. As a young student at Staunton Military Academy in Staunton, Virginia, Henneberger encountered Captain Luke Leary Stevens (1878-1944), an instructor in English who favored Southern authors and devoted an entire semester each year to Edgar Allan Poe. I believe it is through Poe and probably Captain Stevens that we have the title Weird Tales.

Like H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937), Henneberger was born in 1890 and came of age at a time when a mass and popular culture in America was reaching towards full development. Poe's reputation suffered after his death in 1849. But in about 1895-1896, the Henry Altemus Company of Philadelphia began reprinting some of Poe's weird fiction, collected in a number of editions over the following years, all with the title Weird Tales. There were other collections of weird tales, written by other authors, published in the late 1800s and early 1900s, but I don't know of any more likely inspiration for the title of the later magazine than the Henry Altemus editions of Poe's Weird Tales. The last may have been published in 1901. A year later, Hennberger--and Lovecraft--reached that Golden Age of twelve.

The Altemus editions were meant for a mass and popular readership. It's hard to imagine that either of those future writers, Henneberger and Lovecraft, would not have encountered them. Again, I think that the works of Poe were not only the primary source of weird fiction in America but also the source of the title and the term Weird Tales.

To be continued . . .

I am indebted here to a website called Henry Altemus Company, accessible at henryaltemus.com. Everything I have on the Henry Altemus editions of Edgar Allan Poe's Weird Tales, published from about 1895 to about 1901, is from that website. The edition shown above is from 1899. I have altered an image I found on the Internet to get it. We could use straight-on scans of the covers of the Altemus editions rather than oblique photographs if we're going to have a complete study of the origins of Weird Tales magazine.

There were various editions of Poe's Weird Tales, each from a different series published by Altemus. These included the Beauxarts series, the Marqueterie series, the Petit Trianon series, and the Vademecum series. The cover designs across all titles were standardized within these various series. The main differences within each series seem to have been: 1) variations in the color of the covers; and 2) of course the titles and the names of authors, which appear to have been stamped on, again, standardized cover designs. The books in some or all of these series were enclosed within small boxes--something like a slipcase, though not so fine, I guess. Perhaps they were meant as gift books, possibly as inexpensive gift books for a growing popular readership. They may also have been intended for young people and students. Don't take my word for any of this, though. You should puzzle it all out for yourself by visiting the website of the Henry Altemus Company.

The contents of Weird Tales by Edgar Allan Poe (Henry Altemus, ca. 1895-1901 or after) are as follows, from the Internet Speculative Fiction Database:

• "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839)
• "The Tell-Tale Heart" (1843)
• "Berenice" (1850) (variant of "Berenice--A Tale," 1835)
• "The Assignation" (1845) (variant of "The Visionary," 1834)
• "The Pit and the Pendulum" (1842)
• "The Black Cat" (1843)
• "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841)
• "Ligeia" (1838) 
• "The Gold-Bug" (1843)
• "The Oval Portrait" (1845)
• "'Thou Art the Man'" (1844)
• "Shadow--A Parable" (1850) (variant of "Shadow: A Fable," 1835)
• "Silence--a Fable" (1850) (variant of "Siope--A Fable," 1838)
• "Eleonora" (1841)

Of these fourteen works, seven were reprinted in Weird Tales, beginning with "Murders in the Rue Morgue," the cover story of the June 1923 issue. We should note that "The Black Cat" may have been the inspiration for the title of another magazine of popular fiction, The Black Cat, published in Boston beginning in October 1895. The Black Cat influenced, in turn, Weird Tales. One author who had at least one story in both magazines was Clark Ashton Smith.

Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley