Happy New Year to Readers of Weird Tales!
I finished up last year by writing about the one-hundredth anniversary issue of Weird Tales, published in 2023. I will have more on that issue and some ideas connected to it, but I would like to write about other things for a while and get away from that dreary parade.
The first issue of Weird Tales was published in March 1923, thus the first calendar year of "The Unique Magazine" was not a full one. There were only eight issues published in 1923. Weird Tales almost came to an end in its second year. There was a three-month gap during which there weren't any issues published at all, and so only seven appeared in 1924.
Nineteen twenty-five was different, for that was the first full year of Weird Tales, with issues in every month. Twelve more full years would follow, making thirteen dozen issues in all during those years. Nineteen thirty-eight, during which Weird Tales was purchased by Short Stories, Inc., was the last full year of the magazine. I doubt there will ever be another. We just don't have it in us to write enough good stories or to publish and purchase enough issues for that to happen. That's a shame, I think, but not really necessary.
The January 1925 issue has a science-fiction or science-fantasy cover. Illustrating "Invaders from Outside" by J. Schossel (Joseph H. Schlossel [1902-1977]), it may have been the first magazine cover of any kind to show pointy-eared space aliens. Schlossel's aliens, drawn by cover artist Andrew Brosnatch (1896-1965) (below), look suspiciously like the gray aliens of flying saucer folklore--or vice versa. As I have said before, aliens and their spaceships must be imagined before they can be seen.
That January issue was the first to have letters in response to the return of Weird Tales in November 1924, this under its new editor, Farnsworth Wright. "The Eyrie," subtitled in the table of contents as "A Chat with the Readers," included letters from seven readers. At least four of those readers were also writers of fiction, three of them for Weird Tales. "The Eyrie" is no longer a place for readers to let their ideas ad opinions be heard. Instead it's one in which the editor gets to hear himself talk, I guess because he likes so much the sound of his own voice, even when he doesn't have anything very interesting to say.
There were other developments in the magazine world in 1925. On February 21 of that year, The New Yorker, a quintessential slick magazine, made its debut. The New Yorker has been published continuously since then. Weird Tales of course has not been. Weird Tales was originally a pulp magazine but is now also a slick. The New Yorker is a far cry better than the current Weird Tales, which is really just Weird Tales in name only, with a few of its former trappings still in place. I'm not sure which magazine has come down more in the world.
On March 4, 1925, Calvin Coolidge was inaugurated in his first full term as president. The 1920s would thereafter gallop to a close, which you could say came a little early, in late October 1929 when the stock market crashed. During those years, Weird Tales was reaching its peak. The style of the 1920s and '30s was Art Deco, one that got its name after an exposition that opened in Paris on April 29, 1925. The Art Deco style made its way into Weird Tales, too, for example in the art of Hugh Rankin ( 1878-1956). In between those two events, on April 10, 1925, the culture of the 1920s put forth an exemplar of its literature in F. Scott Fitzgerald's great novel, The Great Gatsby. The Great Gatsby has its detractors. I'm not one of them. I have read The Great Gatsby three or four times. I am astonished at how modern it is, even after a century, and how radically different it must have been from some of the stuffy literature of its time. I can't say that Fitzgerald or Hemingway, Faulkner or Dos Passos, had any influence at all on the men and women who wrote for Weird Tales, but I'm not sure they could have avoided the effects of living in the great and roaring milieux of the 1920s.
Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley
