Nonfiction Fillers in the First Issue

There are six nonfiction fillers in the first issue of Weird Tales. All were written anonymously. They are:

• "Queer Tribes of Savages Found in Africa" (p. 130)
• "African Brides Must Be Plump" (p. 130)
• "Ten Pallbearers for This Mammoth Woman" (p. 149)
• "Woman Starves to Feed Her Cats" (p. 149)
• "Unearth Vast Wealth in Egyptian Tomb" (p. 155)
• "'Evil Demon' Drives Man to Orgy of Crime" (p. 160)

"Queer Tribes of Africa" is about the El Molo people of East Africa. "African Brides Must Be Plump" is also about Africa, but it's about a general cultural practice and lacks specifics.

The next two articles are about women in New York City. Mrs. Martha Carmas of Middle Village, Queensboro, New York, is the subject of "Ten Pallbearers for This Enormous Woman." Mrs. Carmas, aged thirty-three, died on January 7, 1923, after having contracted elephantiasis. She weighed 710 pounds at her death. According to a contemporary newspaper article, "A coffin shipping case was used [to carry the body], as the basket coffins in which bodies are usually carried to the undertaking establishments were to [sic] small." (Source: "Builds Huge Coffin for Woman of 710 Pounds" in Lenoir (North Carolina) News-Topic, February 1, 1923, page 8.) The title of Herbert J. Mangham's story "The Basket" refers to just such a basket coffin. One remarkable thing about this brief article in Weird Tales is its immediacy: it was put into print and was on the newsstand about a month or so after the original story first appeared in American newspapers.

"Woman Starves to Feed Her Cats" was also immediate. On January 8, 1923, Mary Bosanti of Avenue S, Brooklyn, New York, was found by neighbors in her apartment. She was weak and starving, surrounded by more than two hundred empty milk bottles, which she had emptied over days and weeks in order to feed the neighborhood cats. Mary was transported to Bellevue Hospital, and that's the last we hear of her. Today we would call her a crazy cat lady.

"Unearth Vast Wealth in Egyptian Tomb" is the longest of the six articles. It tells about the discovery of the tomb of King Tutankhamen, which had been accomplished in November 1922, almost certainly while the first issue of Weird Tales was in preparation. There aren't any stories about Egypt in the first issue, at least so far in my survey, but there would be, including in the giant-sized triple-issue of May/June/July 1924.

Finally there is "'Evil Demon' Drives Man to Orgy of Crime," which tells of Estanislao Puyat, a twenty-nine-year-old Filipino who went on a rampage after being spurned in his affections for his eighteen-year-old niece. Puyat's attack took place in Manila sometime in the month of November 1922. He was said to have been "de malas," that is, possessed by a demon. Puyat didn't know what had come over him. He was afterwards pronounced sane. The poor niece, however, was paralyzed after having been thrown from a window.

Someone associated with Weird Tales was watching the newspapers in the months leading up to the publication of that first issue. It was the kind of thing Charles Fort would have done, but Robert Ripley, creator of Believe It or Not!, was also in that business. We know that Otis Adelbert Kline was, too, for it was he who wrote true crime fillers for Detective Tales, the companion magazine of Weird Tales, in the issues of September and October 1922 at least. The source for that information is a compilation called "Curious Crimes: A Collection of Factual Fillers," in The Compleat OAK Leaves: The Official Journal of Otis Adelbert Kline and His Works (Clayton, GA: A Fictioneer Facsimile Edition, 1980; Issue No. 12, pages 9-11). The editor of OAK Leaves, the late David Anthony Kraft, introduced the compilation, letting us know that Kline's records indicate that he was in fact the author of those otherwise anonymous articles. Kline was a reader of manuscripts for Weird Tales, and he edited the aforementioned giant-sized first-anniversary issue of Weird Tales, dated May/June/July 1924. (See the image below.) He is known to have written anonymously, for the essay "Why Weird Tales?" was his. Considering all of that, I don't think there's any better candidate for authorship of the six nonfiction fillers in the first issue of Weird Tales.

Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley