"The Eyrie," November 1923

There are nineteen letters in Weird Tales for November 1923. It looks like the magazine was gaining pretty rapidly in popularity as 1923 went on. Beyond that, there were some very enthusiastic readers and fans aborning, people who praised and admired Weird Tales, passed issues around to their friends, looked for it on the newsstand every month, and began collecting and keeping issues instead of discarding them. (How many popular magazines went into the trash bin or incinerator in those days!)

One of the first Weird Tales controversies began in November 1924 when the editor, Edwin Baird, printed a letter by Mrs. D.M. Manzer, also known as Isa-belle Manzer, of Amarillo, Texas. The letter is practically illiterate. I can't imagine what the original manuscript would have looked like. Baird asked readers if he should publish the story based on Mrs. Manzer's letter and his brief description of her story. Evidently they said yes, for "The Transparent Ghost" was published as a three-part serial in February, March, and April 1924.

The writers of letters to "The Eyrie," November 1923:

• Mrs. D. M. Manzer (1872 or 1873-1944), aka Isa-belle Manzer, of Amarillo, Texas, who wrote a kind of cover letter for her story submission, "The Transparent Ghost."

• Eighteen-year-old Homer O(ldham) Peterson (b. June 12, 1905, Valparaiso, Indiana; d. Dec. 18, 1978, New Castle, Indiana) of Delaware, Ohio, who commented on several stories in previous issues. Peterson went on to become a high school teacher in Ohio and Indiana. He taught English, French, and journalism and was also a champion chess player.

• Twenty-year-old Cecil John Eustace (b. June 5, 1903, Walton-on-Thames, England; d. 1992) of the Bank of Montreal, St. Catherines, Ontario, who remarked that the August issue of Weird Tales was the first that he had seen in Canada. He was a recent arrival in Canada, having immigrated in August 1922 from his native England. Eustace was a writer of short stories and novels for popular and pulp magazines, including "Ten Days to Live" in Amazing Stories Quarterly, Summer 1928. Later he was an editor at J.M. Dent and Sons in Canada, retiring in 1967. He wrote a dozen books, some of which are novels, others non-fiction. He also collaborated with his daughter, (Elizabeth) Mary Eustace, on a musical. Cecil John Eustace was a Catholic author by the way.

• Austin Hall (1880-1933), author of the recently published serial "The People of the Comet."

• Charles G(ilbert) Kidney (1892-1945) of Cleveland, Ohio, who greatly admired Hall's story. Born in Chicago and having died in Ohio, Kidney was buried in the in-between state of Indiana.

• Sidney E. Johnson of Joplin, Missouri, who predicted that "the fiction center of the United States is going to shift from New York to Chicago." Presumably this was Sidney Evans Johnson (1882-1963). Johnson was like Johnny Appleseed: in his letter he wrote that he scattered copies of the magazine in an effort to grow more readers. Johnson had a second letter in Weird Tales in March 1925.

• Mrs. Elizabeth Purington (dates uncertain--believe it or not, there were and are several Elizabeth Puringtons in America) of Santa Ana, California, who wrote about a dream she had had.

• Joseph Faus (1898-1966) of Miami, Florida, who, with James Bennett Wooding (1897-1954), had had a story called "The Extraordinary Experiment of Dr. Calgroni" in the March 1923 issue of Weird Tales.

• World War I veteran Ralph S. Happel (1892-1963) of Albany, New York.

• Thomas J. Harris (dates unknown) of Brooklyn, New York.

• Walter F. McCanless (1876-1965) of Wadesboro, North Carolina. He had a story, "The Phantom Violinist," in the same issue and would have two more letters in "The Eyrie" in 1924.

• Godfrey Lampert (1898-1968) of Jasper, Indiana, who wrote a letter full of questions. Lampert was an artist, druggist, and city councilman in Jasper, a city known as a maker of office furniture.

• Lee Andrews (1902-1977) of Indianapolis, Indiana.

• Mrs. F. Wickman (1885-1942) of Duluth, Minnesota. Mrs. Wickman, aka Rosella (Cole) Wickman, really liked "The Gorilla" by Horatio V. Ellis, as well she should have, for the author, Horatio Vernon Ellis (1895-1945), was her son. And so we have an answer to the question of "Who was  . . ?" so commonly encountered when it comes to tellers of weird tales. 

• Thirteen-year-old Ralph Fingle (dates unknown; his name may have been misspelled in print) of Long Beach, California, who took a quarter from "a very nearly empty bank" so that he could buy a copy of Weird Tales and read "The People of the Comet."

• Mrs. Thomas Earl Davison (dates unknown) of Chicago, Illinois, who commented on stories from way back in the first issue. She thought of "The Basket" by Herbert J. Mangham (1896-1967) as "rotten." Believing she could do better, she submitted a story with her letter. I assume that her story is lost forever.

• Edith Lyle Ragsdale (ca. 1878-?) of Centralia, Illinois, who liked weird stories and went on to write three of her own published in Weird Tales in 1924-1926.

• E. B. (dates unknown) of West Point, Maine.

• Gertrude (Carey) Strauss (1866-1929) of Puyallup, Washington, an artist and poet.

Writers of letters were real people who lived real lives. They were not just ghosts with addresses. Maybe we forget that. Isa-belle Manzer notwithstanding, many of the readers of Weird Tales read and wrote at a high level, evidence that pulp magazines were not necessarily trash. And of course many of those readers knew what is weird fiction or a weird tale, and they sought out that genre. Many also liked what they called "the scientific story," or what we would call science fiction, or at least science fantasy. There wasn't yet a name for that type a story--science fiction as a term did not appear in print until 1929--but they sought out that type of story, too, and asked for more.

I have read only a few of the stories published in Weird Tales in 1923, but I sense that in a brief eight months, from March to November of that first year, their average quality improved, while authors were reaching towards just what makes weird fiction, science fiction, and science fantasy. And of course in that first year, H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Seabury Quinn, Otis Adelbert Kline, Frank Owen, Anthony M. Rud, and other returning authors made their debut in the magazine. Weird Tales could have died in its first year or two. But there were enough people who believed in it and wanted it to go on--readers included--that it was able to survive. And again, here we are one hundred years later and able to hold in our hands a newly printed issue of "The Unique Magazine," the magazine that never dies.

Homer O. Peterson (1905-1978), far right, in a photograph from the Indianapolis Star Magazine, November 9, 1958, whole page number 153.

Cecil John Eustace (1903-1992), from an article called "New Novel Written as Short Stories" in the Toronto Star, March 9, 1929, page 32.

Forty-five years later, Cecil Eustace with his daughter Mary in the same newspaper, the Toronto Star, November 23, 1974, whole page number 119. Photograph by Dick Darrell.

Godfrey Lampert (1898-1968), third from the left (in the dark suit), from the Jasper, Indiana, Herald, December 31, 1955, page 1.

Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley