Weird Tales was in print from March 1923 to September 1954. The magazine sometimes observed its own anniversary. Sometimes it was the readers who did the observing in their letters to "The Eyrie." The most prominent anniversary issues were the first, in May/June/July 1924, and the twenty-fifth, in March 1948. Weird Tales was not in print from October 1954 until the summer of 1973. If there were observances of anniversaries during those years, they would have been in other places and under other banners. If there were such observances, I don't know anything about them.
I wrote the other day that Sam Moskowitz is supposed to have dissuaded Leo Margulies from bringing Weird Tales back into print. Now I have a source for that information. In Weird Tales #1, edited by Lin Carter and published in 1980, Moskowitz wrote:
I twice talked Leo Margulies out of reviving the magazine, once in 1958 and again in the sixties, because I thought he would lose his shirt. (p. 266)
So if Margulies had gone ahead with bringing back Weird Tales in 1958, maybe it would have been just in time for the thirty-fifth anniversary of "The Unique Magazine."
There weren't any issues and no revivals at all during the 1960s, although now I find that two of the Pyramid paperback anthologies about which I wrote the other day were intended as the start of a series. In Weird Tales #1, Sam Moskowitz revealed:
I ghost edited for Leo Margulies the Pyramid paperbacks Weird Tales (1964) and Worlds of Weird (1965), which were intended to be a series, with covers and some interiors by Virgil Finlay. They apparently did not do well enough to justify continuing the series [. . .]. (p. 265)
Moskowitz went on to put together the fiftieth-anniversary issue of Weird Tales in Summer 1973 and three more issues in that brief four-issue revival. There wasn't any forty-fifth anniversary issue in 1968, nor a fifty-fifth anniversary issue in 1978, again, because Weird Tales was not in print during those years.
Lin Carter's four paperback issues of Weird Tales were published from 1980 to 1983. The last issue came out in 1983. I don't have a copy of it, but I assume there was at least some awareness of an anniversary, for Carter reprinted Anthony M. Rud's story "Ooze," originally in the first issue of the magazine from sixty years before.
There were two issues of Weird Tales published by Bellerophon Network in 1984-1985. These, too, were aware of the history of Weird Tales magazine, but there isn't any overt anniversary content in their pages as far as I can see. (Thanks again to Brian Forbes for providing me with the contents of those two issues.) And now we're getting close to another revival of Weird Tales and the sixty-fifth-anniversary issue of Spring 1988. A couple of things came before that issue, though, and I'll write about those next.
To be continued . . .
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| Weird Tales #1 (1980), edited by Lin Carter, with cover art by Tom Barber. |
Carter did indeed acknowledge the anniversary in the last of his 4 "issues". He says "By the time this issue reaches the stand, Weird Tales will have entered its sixtieth year, so this is by way of being an anniversary issue to The Unique Magazine.
ReplyDeleteBy this issue, the 287th, we have published (at a conservative estimate), some 14,713,000 words . . .yes, fourteen million, seven hundred and thirteen thousand words of the finest stories in the modem literature of the macabre.
As seems only befitting, we are celebrating this anniversary in a “unique” manner: that is, we are happy to present herein two contributions, written especially for Weird Tales, by two writers who, between them, represent virtually the entire history of this extraordinary magazine. The first of these is Frank Belknap Long, who made his first appearance
in these pages in 1924, our second year of publication. Mr. Long, a youthful protege of the great H.P. Lovecraft and a prolific and gifted writer in his own right, has contributed fiction and verse to no fewer than forty-seven issues of the magazine. He appears in this
issue with a new story, aptly entitled “Homecoming.”
Our second “anniversary item” is the work of one of our most distinguished alumni, Mr. Ray Bradhury. While Mr. Long was the first major discovery of WT’s most famous editor, Farnsworth Wright, Mr. Bradbury was an early discovery of Dorothy Mcllwraith, who succeeded Farnsworth Wright to the prestigious editorial chair. His first story appeared in our issue for November, 1942, eighteen years after the debut of Frank Belknap Long, and over the years his distinctive short-stories have adorned some twenty-seven issues of
Wierd Tales. His last appearance here was in our Fall, 1973 issue, while Mr. Long’s last appearance here was in the issue dated Summer, 1974.
Between the two of these gifted gentlemen, then, they span most of the entire history of Weird Tales— two hundred and seventy-three issues, anyway—which explains why, to us, they represent the history of the Unique Magazine. And we are delighted to welcome them back to this sixtieth anniversary issue of the magazine in which they both were first
published.
[snip]
One final word on this sixtieth anniversary issue, and then we vnll turn the page over to our correspondents. Our Weird Tales ‘First’ department has become a regular fixture in this new series, and for this very special issue it seems only fitting and proper to reprint
a story from the very first issue of this magazine, that of March, 1923.
Among the twenty-four stories, and the first part of a serial, which appeared in that historic first issue, only one tale has survived the generations to become something of a modem classic in horror fiction. Often anthologized, it seems appropriate to reprint it at this time . . . “Ooze,” by Anthony M. Rud."
Thank you, Phil,
DeleteI have posted the excerpt you provided.
TH