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Friday, August 16, 2024

Weird Tales: The Sixteenth Anniversary

The May 1939 installment of "The Eyrie" began with these words:

For sixteen years WEIRD TALES has consistently endeavored to give its readers stories that are different from any to be found elsewhere. In addition to the best weird and fantastic stories obtainable, we have sought out and printed other highly imaginative tales, so plausibly told that they seem entirely possible and convincing. That we have succeeded in our purpose of presenting utterly different literary fare is attested by the multitudinous flood of enthusiastic letters from you, the readers, throughout the years this magazine has been published. Such a different story is The Hollow Moon in this issue, the story of a lunar vampire, written by an author [Everil Worrell] whose previous vampire story, The Canal, was acclaimed by no less an authority than the late H. P. Lovecraft himself as one of the greatest vampire tales ever written. The next few months will be particularly rich in such highly original and utterly different tales, notable among them being Giants of the Sky by Frank Belknap Long, Jr., an unusual tale of vast beings in a super-cosmos who made our earth the object of an experiment; King of the World's Edge by H. Warner Munn, an intriguing weird novel of America in King Arthur's Time, with Merlin as one of its principal characters; and Spawn by P. Schuyler Miller, as powerful and strange a tale as it has ever been our good fortune to present to you, our readers.

(Boldface added.) 

Weird Tales, May 1939, with a cover story, "The Hollow Moon," by Everil Worrell and cover art by Harold S. De Lay. Throughout most of 1939, each issue of Weird Tales contained 164 pages. I believe that was as close as it ever came to the very long issues of 1923-1924.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

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