Weird Tales: The Fourth Anniversary

If you're on the hunt for observances of anniversaries in Weird Tales, the place to look is in "The Eyrie," the regular letters column and the place in print where the editor communicated with readers, as well as with authors, who were frequent writers to the magazine. If you look only in the March issues, you might miss something. A better place might be in the May issues of every year, for it was in the May issue that readers had their first chance to comment on the issue from two months before. The editor could then join in and make his own comments.

I have looked in Weird Tales in the March and May issues of 1925 and 1926 and haven't found any mention of anniversaries. "The Eyrie" in the May 1927 issue opens with these words, though: "WEIRD TALES is now four years old." The editorial continues:

When it first appeared on the news stands, many thought it was "just another magazine," but it was soon discovered that WEIRD TALES was a "different" magazine, with a wholesome disregard for the self-imposed editorial limitations of other publications. The fantastic monsters of ancient legend stalked through its pages; werewolves lived again; ghosts and apparitions took on modem trappings; specters wailed in haunted houses; and scientists performed weird experiments in their laboratories. Magazine pages were again opened to the rich literature of the bizarre and fantastic, and with the return of weird fiction to the news stands came the new literature, of which WEIRD TALES is the foremost exponent--the weird-scientific story. The forward leap that science has taken in the last fifty years has stimulated the imaginations of authors, and in the pages of WEIRD TALES the future of the world is rolled back, the void of Space is peopled with flying ships, which can go backward and forward in Time as well as Space; mad scientists strive to destroy the world; tremendous dooms rush in upon the Earth from the sky.

The amazing success of WEIRD TALES has been built upon three types of stories--the weird tale proper; the bizarre and fantastic story; and the weird-scientific story. That these types of stories, which take one away from the humdrum environment of everyday life, are appreciated by the reading public is shown by the steady growth of WEIRD TALES. We shall continue to give you the kind of stories we have given you in the past. And if you like these stories, if you want to aid in building up an even greater success for your magazine, you can do so by calling the attention of your friends to the feast of imaginative reading it contains and letting them share the good things therein.

That's a pretty nice summary of the previous four years in Weird Tales. I read it as almost a progress report, or as a continuation of "Why Weird Tales?" from the first-anniversary number of May/June/July 1924. I think we have to assume that Farnsworth Wright was the author of that anonymous editorial. H.P. Lovecraft gets a lot of well-deserved credit as a theorist of weird fiction, but Wright might be right up there with him. And now we're off in search of anniversaries.

Weird Tales, May 1927, the fourth-anniversary issue, with a cover story, "The Master of Doom" by Donald Edward Keyhoe, later a flying saucer enthusiast, and cover art by C.C. Senf.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley