Weird Tales: The Sixth Anniversary

I didn't find anything on the five-year anniversary of Weird Tales, but here are the beginning paragraphs of the May 1929 installment of "The Eyrie":

IT IS now more than six years since the first copy of WEIRD TALES appeared on the news stands. The magazine was created to fill a very real demand for something radically different, something that would let the fancy escape from the humdrum, everyday life of the world; a magazine whose stories should plumb the depths of occult horror, as Lovecraft has done in so many of his tales; a magazine that should not shrink from the terrible mysteries of madness and wild imagination, but should deal boldly with what Clark Ashton Smith in one of his memorable sonnets calls life's

"dark, malign and monstrous music, spun
In hell, from some delirious Satan's dream."

Here at last was to be a magazine whose readers could not begin a story with the bland assurance that the hero would triumph in the final paragraphs, and all turn out sweetly in the time-honored stereotyped manner, and the heroine be surely rescued.

The magazine, we believe, has lived up to the aims of the founders, and has provided a feast of imaginative literature that has entrenched it thoroughly in the affections of its readers, and assured its continued success as long as we continue to play fair with you by printing superb weird tales such as we have given you in the past--stories that reach out into the depths of space and picture such beings as Donald Wandrei describes in The Red Brain; stories of such cataclysmic horror as H. P. Lovecraft depicts in The Rats in the Walls; stories that sound the abysses of physical suffering as H. Warner Munn does in The Chain; fantastic tales surcharged with beauty and sweetness and light, such as The Wind That Tramps the World, by Frank Owen; epochal masterpieces such as E. Hoffmann Price's sublime little tale of devil-worship, The Stranger From Kurdistan, with its audacious close; superb imaginative master-works of literary craft such as A. Merritt's tale of the revolt of the forest, The Woman of the Wood. It is our aim to continue to give you such marvelous weird tales as these; for it is on these stories, and others like them, that the brilliant success of WEIRD TALES has been built.

(Boldface added.)

These paragraphs are more specific than those of the fourth-anniversary editorial of May 1927. They also seem to me more boosterish. If this had been published in 2024, I might think it was written by artificial intelligence. (The truly human is authentic. AI is inauthentic, and what it writes evokes feelings that are the verbal equivalent of the visual uncanny valley. In other words, AI is creepy. People who write like AI are inauthentic. Their writing, too, evokes uncanny feelings.)

By the way, "The Woman of the Wood," by A. Merritt, was voted by readers the most popular story published in Weird Tales between 1924 and 1940. With an initial "A" and a last name that is a homophone for "merit," I guess Merritt was destined for excellence.

Weird Tales, May 1929, with a cover story, "The Scourge of B'Moth," by Bertram Russell and cover art by C.C. Senf.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley