August Derleth wrote the first essay to appear in "The Eyrie" in March 1948. Half of it is a catalogue of names and titles. I'll have more on that in a minute. First, Derleth's essay:
25th Anniversary Issue --
August Derleth
FOR a quarter of a century WEIRD TALES has given those who delight in the fantastic and macabre the best in the genre, and it has remained the most consistently satisfying outlet of its kind. For all these years authors and readers have looked to this unique magazine as something very special, and, despite a welter of imitators, something very special it has remained. A magazine which has brought to the attention of its public the work of such authors as H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Henry S. Whitehead, Ray Bradbury, and many another fine writer has justified many times over its sterling reason for being and has earned its right to exist. When I began to read WEIRD TALES with the very first issue, I was thirteen, and I had to work at mowing lawns, chopping wood, and the like to earn the quarter that would buy the magazine. Few purchases have ever given me such lasting satisfaction.
It seems incredible that a quarter of a century has passed, and now, when I look back over those rich years of WEIRD TALES, I can experience again the wonderful delight of discovery and the deep reading satisfaction I knew in such stories as Lovecraft's The Rats in the Walls, The Dunwich Horror, The Music of Erich Zann, The Outsider, and others, [Seabury] Quinn's The Phantom Farmhouse, [H.F.] Arnold's The Night Wire, [Clark Ashton] Smith's A Rendezvous in Averoigne, [Henry S.] Whitehead's Passing of a God, [Arthur J.] Burks' The Ghosts of Steamboat Coulee, [Robert E.] Howard's The Black Stone, [C.L.] Moore's Shambleau, [Mary Elizabeth] Counselman's The Three Marked Pennies, [Nictzin] Dyalhis' When the Green Star Waned, [Donald] Wandrei's The Red Brain, [H. Warner] Munn's The Werewolf of Ponkert, [Ray] Bradbury's The Lake, [J. Paul] Suter's Beyond the Door, [Frank] Owen's The Wind That Tramps the World, [Frank Belknap] Long's The Hounds of Tindalos, [Greye] La Spina's Invaders from the Dark, [E. Hoffman] Price's Stranger from Kurdistan, [Carl] Jacobi's Revelations in Black, [A.] Merritt's The Woman of the Wood, [Edmond] Hamilton's Monster-God of Mamurth, [Wilfred Branch] Talman's Two Black Bottles, [Everil] Worrell's The Canal, [John Martin] Leahy's In Amundsen's Tent, [Robert] Bloch's Enoch, and countless other stories space does not permit mentioning.
These first twenty-five years have given us a rich heritage in the strange and wonderful; I have every confidence that the next twenty-five will add increasing stature to WEIRD TALES.
AUGUST DERLETH.
(Boldface added.)
Alas, Weird Tales had just six and a half years left in its original run. The second twenty-five-year mark would be observed in a second run of just four issues in 1973-1974.
The first name Derleth mentioned in his essay is that of his literary god, H.P. Lovecraft. He couldn't have done anything less. Despite the fact that Quinn and Derleth had more stories in Weird Tales, it is Lovecraft's name that is most closely identified with the magazine. By the way, today, August 20, 2024, would have been Lovecraft's 134th birthday, had he lived as long as some of his characters.
Derleth's second paragraph is mostly just a list. Lists are fine. We all make them. But they're not writing. At best, a list is just filler. At their worst, lists are name-dropping. In his essay "Moving Past Lovecraft," from 2012, author and editor Jeff VanderMeer dropped a lot of names that, truth be told, are not very well known. I guess the rest of us are benighted in comparison because we have different names on our lists, names not to his liking. In the 100th-anniversary issue of Weird Tales, from 2023, the current editor of the magazine, Jonathan Maberry, also dropped names in his essay "Cosmic Horror and Weird Tales Go Hand-in-Tentacle." I sense that to be filler. In any case, lists are, again, not writing. Beyond that, we all have access to names and titles and now even to whole stories in Weird Tales. We can all read them and make lists of our own. Ironically, Mr. VanderMeer's call for us to move past Lovecraft appears to have gone unheeded, as the centennial issue of Weird Tales is subtitled "Cosmic Horror Issue." (According to Wikipedia, "cosmic horror" is a term synonymous with "Lovecraftian horror." Jeff VanderMeer even used the term "cosmic horror" in his essay.) Lovecraft's name is mentioned second in Mr. Maberry's essay, second only to that of Robert W. Chambers. Too bad, Mr. VanderMeer. You tried.
I don't know what, if anything, it meant if you were not included in August Derleth's list from 1948. Maybe he liked you just fine, he just wasn't permitted the space to include you. On the other hand, maybe you were like C. Hall Thompson, who may have been on a completely different kind of list created by Derleth, and whose last story for Weird Tales appeared in the May issue of 1948, just two months after the anniversary issue.
To be concluded . . .
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| August Derleth, from the Green Bay Press-Gazette, March 31, 1963, page 13. |
Revised on the morning of publication.
Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley
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