World Tales (1985)

In 1985, the World Fantasy Convention was held at the Doubletree Hotel in Tucson, Arizona. The dates were October 31 to November 3, 1985. The souvenir book of the convention is entitled World Tales, and it was made to look like an issue of "The Unique Magazine." Not only does it look like an issue of Weird Tales, it is superior in quality to any issue published up until that time. You might as well call it an honorary issue of the magazine, published at a time when Weird Tales was not. The cover art is by Victoria Poyser. That keeps with the precedent of cover art by a woman artist. In the 1930s and '40s, she was Margaret Brundage. In the program book of two years before, she was Rowena Morrill. World Tales is pulp-sized, perfect bound, and contains 88 pages. The paper is off-white and beautifully made. The cover stock is excellent, and the typeface resembles that of a pulp magazine of long ago. Donald D. Markstein was the man behind the book. He designed, produced, and packaged World Tales. Weird Tales-related content includes an appreciation of guest of honor Evangeline Walton, a poem by Clark Ashton Smith, and a letter's column called "The Crow's Nest," but then the whole issue is Weird Tales-related in that it's essentially a facsimile of the original. If you collect issues of Weird Tales, you might want to add this book to your collection.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley