Weird Tales: The Thirtieth Anniversary

In its March issue of 1953, Weird Tales magazine printed a letter from Irving Glassman of Brooklyn, New York, in observance of the thirtieth anniversary of the magazine. Glassman had one other letter in Weird Tales. That one was printed in the May 1952 issue and reprinted in H.P. Lovecraft in "The Eyrie", edited by S.T. Joshi and Marc A. Michaud (1979). Glassman referred to H.P. Lovecraft in his first letter and made an oblique reference to Lovecraft in his second:

The Editor, WEIRD TALES

9 Rockefeller Plaza, New York 20, N. Y.

My calendar informs me that with the next issue WEIRD TALES celebrates its thirtieth anniversary. I would like to be among those who offer their congratulations to the most long-lived of all imaginative magazines.

I, myself, am too young to have read those early issues of The Unique Magazine but I have read many of those stories in later editions of WT as well as in the Arkham House books. I have in my library a copy of The Moon Terror which, I believe, was the first anthology of stories taken exclusively from your magazine. The Moon Terror is something of a rara avis today and I'm quite proud to own that book.

It would be fitting on this occasion to present a list of what I consider to be the ten best stories to have appeared in WT but such a task, I find, is impossible. At least 50 outstanding phantasies come to mind and there are more than that number which are equally good but which have, for the moment, escaped my memory. For every poorly-written tale that is printed in WT (and that only proves that the editor is human, after all) there are at least a dozen readable ones and of that dozen you will find that about half of them are potential classics. This is not merely my opinion; it is shared by all the readers of your Unique Magazine. Please keep up the good work.

Every best wish to you.

Yours by the Doom that came to Sarnath,

Irving Glassman, Brooklyn, N. Y.

There weren't very many Irving Glassmans in public records. Unfortunately, I can't say for sure who he was.

Weird Tales, March 1953, with a cover story "Slime," by Joseph Payne Brennan and cover art by Virgil Finlay. This is one of my favorite covers by Finlay for "The Unique Magazine." I think it's also one of his best. "Ooze" by Anthony M. Rud was the cover story for the first issue of Weird Tales in March 1923. "Slime" has some similarities to "Ooze." As I wrote recently, it also has some similarities to "It" by Theodore Sturgeon.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley