Weird Tales, May 1923, was the first issue with interior illustrations, all by William F. Heitman, a sketch artist for the Indianapolis Star. Heitman also did the cover art. It was the first of his two covers for "The Unique Magazine."
The May issue is larger than previous issues in terms of its dimensions, but smaller in terms of its page count. Robert Weinberg called it a bedsheet-sized magazine, in other words, 8-1/2 by 11 inches, or about the same dimensions as a quarto-sized book. There are 120 interior pages and three columns of type instead of the two that appeared in the previous two issues. If you're going to read it on line, you'll have to enlarge it a lot more than what it initially appears. There are twenty-one stories in the May issue, plus ten non-fiction fillers, plus "The Eyrie." The amount of content, then, appears to be about the same as in the March issue, which has twenty-six stories, and the April issue, which has twenty-one. The cover price is the same, too, 25 cents.
Returning authors were Julian Kilman, Hamilton Craigie, William Sanford, and with the second and final part of their serial "The Whispering Thing," Laurie McClintock and Culpeper Chunn. Firsts include the first story in Weird Tales by Vincent Starrett of Chicago, as well as the first reprint, an abridged version of "The Haunted and the Haunters; or, The House and the Brain" by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, originally in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, DXXVI, August 1859.
There is one anonymously written story in the third issue of Weird Tales, "The Closed Cabinet." There are also lots of stories by little-known authors, a focus of this blog. I'll have to look into some of them. Finally, there is one story by an author known to have been a woman, "Case No. 27" by Mollie Frank Ellis of my Indiana home.
I have written before about nine of the authors in the May issue. They are:
- Julian Kilman (1878-1954)
- Paul Ellsworth Triem (1886-1972)
- George W. Crane (1901-1995)
- E. Thayles Emmons (1882-1971)
- Hamilton Craigie (1880-1956)
- Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873)
- Laurie McClintock (1889?-1956?) & Culpeper Chunn (1889-1927)
- William Sanford (1878-1929)
Click on their names to read what I have written.
Next: More Authors & Stories
Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley
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