Weird Tales, May/June/July 1924-Non-Fiction & Other Fillers

Following is a list of the fillers in the May/June/July issue of Weird Tales, a list transcribed from the Internet Speculative Fiction Database. Thanks to them again. All are by uncredited authors. Most have asterisks around them. Read on to see what they mean.

• **"Juvenile Criminal," about the Hon. Grey Bennett and a boy named Leary. There really was a Grey Bennett, as remote from the first year of Weird Tales as we are from it.**

• **"Retaliation," about a British ship.**

• **"Providential Warning at Sea," about Captain Thomas Rogers and his ship Society in about 1694.**

• **"Pastime of Despots," about Czar Peter.**

• **"The Unnatural Son," about a theft in Salisbury.**

• **"Singular Discovery of a Murder in 1740," an account of events at St. Neots, England.**

• **"Giants," about very tall men known to history.**

• **"Sham Fight," about a battle between Christian and Musselman armies at Bostra [sic].**

• **"War Horses," about war in Funen, Denmark.**

• **"The Original Bluebeard," about Gilles, Marquis de Laval. Seabury Quinn had covered him before in his non-fiction series "Weird Crimes," in October 1923.**

• **"Distressing March of the Crusaders Through Phrygia."**

• **"Remarkable Accident," about Baptiste, an actor at the Comedie Francaise in 1820.**

• *"An Account of a Family Who Were All Afflicted with the Loss of Their Limbs," about John Dowling of Wattisham, England.*

• *"Hypocrisy Detected," set in Paris.*

• *"Force of Imagination," also set in Paris.*

• *"Immolation of Human Beings," about the Ashantees [sic] of Africa.*

• **"Imprisonment of Baron De Geramb."**

• *"Anecdote Concerning the Execution of King Charles the First."*

• **"Anne Boleyn."**

• **"The Heroes of Hindoostan."**

• *"Extraordinary Instance of Second Sight," about a French army officer quartered in Scotland during "the previous century."*

• **"Miracles," about a Dr. Connell and his patient, named Anne Mulligan, in 1777.**

• **"National Superstition," about two Venetians.**

• **"Death of the Duchess of Bedford."**

• **"Pardon for Forgery," a case from 1803.**

• **"Terrific Death of a Painter," about Peter Peutemann.**

• **"Deaths by Lightning," set in Ireland.**

• **"Wonderful Providence," about war in France in 1562.**

• **"Monsieur Rouelle," about the "celebrated chemist."**

• **"A Singular Experiment," about an Irish boy named Magrath who fell into the hands of a "subtile doctor," a kind of Procrustes who experimented on the boy and made of him a monstrous creation. This account goes along with my suggestion that medical doctors are very often psychopaths or sociopaths and see their fellow human beings as mere material and subjects for their bizarre and monstrous experimentation. We recently had one of those at the head of a large governmental agency. He and his fellows very likely developed and loosed upon the world a deadly virus and in response created an oppressive regime that is still lurking, still preying, including in the minds of his and their followers, supporters, and apologists. Monstrous medical doctors recently won a victory for themselves in Ohio, too. Now they have the power under the state constitution to decide who is a human being and who is not. Now we have another Moloch State.**

• **"Pentilly House, Cornwall," about a Mr. Tilly, an atheist.**

• **"Singular Combat," about England in the time of Henry IV.**

• **"Fatal Misfortune and Singular Instance of Affection in a Horse," set in England.**

• *"Punishment of the Knout in Russia."*

• **"Intrepid Conduct of Admiral Douglas," about a mutiny on board the ship Stately.**

• "Only Sound," a very brief item from the Los Angeles Times. (Below it are two jokes.)

• "Odd Facts," half a dozen brief fillers. (Below it are three anecdotes or jokes. So there are five untitled anecdotes or jokes in addition to 37 titled fillers.)

As I was about halfway through this list, I discovered the original source of most of these accounts. The source is:

The Terrific Register; or, Record of Crimes, Judgements, Providences, and Calamities, Volume I and Volume II, published in 1825 by Sherwood, Jones, and Co., of London, and Hunter of Edinburgh.

Presumably all are factual, so no fiction to add to the 37 stories in this issues. Items taken from Volume I have single asterisks around them in the list above. Those from Volume II have double asterisks. Seven of the items are from Volume I of The Terrific Register. Twenty-eight are from Volume II. That makes 35 in all, leaving only two that are from other sources.

So, if we're trying to get from 37 new stories in the interior of the anniversary number to the 50 promised on its cover, then we'll have to add 13 of the items listed above, I guess. You get to choose. A couple of them are almost as long as the shortest new stories.

It's clear that Otis Adelbert Kline was not the author of these fillers, as he had been (or probably was) in previous issues. But if he was acting as editor, or co-editor, then maybe he was the one who chose them for inclusion. And that makes me think that there must have been copies of these two volumes either in a public or university library in Chicago or in a private collection to which he had access. And now I think we had better look at the fillers in previous issues for their possible origins in the same two volumes of The Terrific Register.

I have written before about the Fortean method. I called it that after Charles Fort (1874-1932), author, gadfly of science, and collector of oddities. People who read and wrote for Weird Tales knew of Fort and his ways. Some became Forteans themselves. Others simply availed themselves of the Fortean method in creating their fictions. Like I said, I have suspected that Otis Adelbert Kline was the author of the many non-fiction fillers printed in Weird Tales in its first year, and maybe he was after all, taking after Fort in the process. But it's clear with this discovery of The Terrific Register as a source that Kline was not the sole author of the Weird Tales fillers and that Fort was not the first collector of oddities. He, along with Kline, was simply working in an older tradition. I wonder how far back that tradition goes. And I wonder: is history simply a field engaged in telling about the odd events--the crimes, judgements, providences, and calamities--of the past? Aside from that, are not these accounts simply retellings of how weird works in our lives and affairs?

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Lady Gwendolen Cecil (1860-1945)

Lady Gwendolen Georgiana Gascoyne-Cecil
Author, Biographer
Born July 28, 1860, London, England
Died September 28, 1945, Hertfordshire, Hertford, England

Gwendolen Georgiana Gascoyne-Cecil was born on July 28, 1860, in London, England. She was the daughter of Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (1830-1903), and the former Georgina Charlotte Alderson (1827-1899). Gwendolen's father, the Marquess of Salisbury, also known as Lord Robert Cecil and Lord Salisbury, was a member of Parliament, secretary of state for India, British foreign secretary, and three-time prime minister of the United Kingdom. His wife was his literary assistant and the mother of his eight children. She also wrote political articles for publication in the Saturday Review and the Quarterly Review.

Lady Gwendolen Cecil was an author and her father's biographer. She wrote a short story called "The Little Ray," published in The Pall Mall Magazine in August 1894. She was also the anonymous author of "The Closed Cabinet," which was in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine (Vol. CLVII, No. DCCCLI) in January 1895. Her major work was her four-volume biography of her father, entitled Life of Robert, Marquis of Salisbury (1921, 1932). "The Closed Cabinet" was her lone story in Weird Tales, and it was reprinted anonymously.

Lady Gwendolen died on September 28, 1945, in Hertfordshire, Hertford, England. She was eighty-five years old. She has a cultivar of the peony named after her, a distinction no doubt unique among contributors to "The Unique Magazine."

Lady Gwendolen Cecil's Story in Weird Tales
"The Closed Cabinet" as by _____ _____ (May 1923)

Further Reading
Not much that I have found or of note except in old newspaper articles, including a number that describe her being in an automobile accident in 1908. She was run over by her own electric vehicle after having gotten out to open a gate.

Gwendolen Gascoyne-Cecil (1860-1945) in a portrait drawn in 1895 by Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898).

Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

"The Closed Cabinet" by _____ _____ & Sunday Swipes No. 3

"The Moon Terror" by A.G. Birch was the first story in the May 1923 issue of Weird Tales. "The Closed Cabinet" by _____ _____ was the last. _____ _____ was an anonymous author in the pages of "The Unique Magazine" and in the original. The original was Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine (Vol. CLVII, No. DCCCLI), published in January 1895. The publication of "The Closed Cabinet" was announced in newspapers in December 1894. In its issue of January 21, 1895, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle called it "an old time Scotch story." (p. 12)

In an item called "Literary Gossip," the Bowling Green, Ohio, Daily Sentinel-Tribune (Mar. 7, 1895, p. 2) attributed authorship of the story to Lady Gwendolen Cecil, daughter of the Marquess of Salisbury. There isn't any source given for that bit of information. This was gossip after all. Her authorship was previously confirmed in The Author, Playwright and Composer, Volumes 5 and 6, page 246, also from 1895. Maybe that's the source of the item out of Bowling Green. By the way, The Collector's Index to Weird Tales by Sheldon R. Jaffery and Fred Cook, an indispensable source in my writing of this blog, was also published in Bowling Green.

I'm not the first person to track down authorship of "The Closed Cabinet" to Lady Gwendolen. Scottish editor Johnny Mains (b. 1976) did that before me for his collection A Suggestion of Ghosts: Supernatural Fiction by Women, 1854-1900 (2018). More than a hundred years before Mr. Mains published his book, Julian Hawthorne (1846-1934) included "The Closed Cabinet" in his series Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories (1907-1909?). It looks like this series was also called and/or reprinted as The Lock and Key Library. Lady Gwendolen's story is in the volume Old-Time English Stories (1909), the contents of which are as follows:

• "The Haunted House" by Charles Dickens (1859)
• "No. 1 Branch Line: The Signal-Man" by Charles Dickens (1866)
• "The Haunted and the Haunters; or, The House and the Brain" by Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1859)
• "The Incantation" by Edward Bulwer-Lytton (date unknown)
• "The Avenger" by Thomas De Quincey (1838)
• "Melmoth the Wanderer" by Charles Maturin (1821)
• "A Mystery with a Moral" by Laurence Sterne (date unknown)
• "On Being Found Out" by William Makepeace Thackeray (1861)
• "The Notch on the Ax" by William Makepeace Thackeray (1862)
• "Bourgonef" by unknown
• "The Closed Cabinet" by unknown (Lady Gwendolen Cecil)

Only some of these are considered fantasy, ghost stories, or weird fiction. Not all are included in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database.

"The Haunted and the Haunters; or, The House and the Brain" by Edward Bulwer-Lytton was the first reprint in Weird Tales, "The Closed Cabinet" now the second. It looks as though both came from the same source, namely, Julian Hawthorne's collection from earlier in the century. Charles Dickens' story "The Signal-Man" was also reprinted in Weird Tales, in the issue of April 1930. A second by-the-way: Julian Hawthorne was the son of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) and the father of Hildegarde Hawthorne (1871-1952), both of whom also had stories in Weird Tales, though both posthumously.

Next: Lady Gwendolen Cecil (1860-1945)

"Her Countenance Grew Fierce," an illustration by an unknown artist for "The Incantation" by Edward Bulwer-Lytton and the frontispiece for The Lock and Key Library: The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations, Old Time English, edited by Julian Hawthorne (New York: The Review of Reviews Co., 1915). I have altered this image from a photograph taken of the original.

The image shown above may seem familiar to you. Have a look at the cover illustration for the May 1923 issue of Weird Tales, made by William F. Heitman:

Now here they are side by side, with the Weird Tales cover flipped:

No wonder Heitman's cover was so uncharacteristic of his regular work, and no wonder that the male figure on the right doesn't match very well the female on the left in its treatment or technique.

Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales, May 1923-Part Three

Six authors about whom I know little or nothing at all, all of whom had stories in Weird Tales in May 1923:

William P. Barron (Dates unknown)--I found a newspaper item that mentions a Dr. William P. Barron who was president of the Free Lance Club of writers in Washington, D.C., in 1930 and 1931. If he's our man, then I believe he was the same William P. Barron (1877-1946) who hailed from Bonham, Texas, and served in the U.S. Army Medical Corps during World War I. His story, called "Jungle Beasts," is another example of a found manuscript as the basis for a story. One of the readers of the manuscript is a medical doctor working in an insane asylum.

M. Humphreys (Dates unknown)-"The Floor Above" by M. Humphreys is a diary story, a story that begins with a summons from a friend, and a rooming-house story. H.P. Lovecraft liked "The Floor Above," but good luck finding any evidence of that on this vaunted Internet. The status of Humphreys' tale as one of Lovecraft's favorites seems to be based entirely on a single sentence in Lovecraft's letter to "The Eyrie," printed in October 1923:

"I lately read the May WEIRD TALES, and congratulate you on Mr. Humphrey's 'The Floor Above.' [for a moment I had a shiver which the author didn’t intend—I thought he was going to use an idea which I am planning to use myself!! But it wasn't so, after all], which is a close second to my favorite, 'Beyond the Door'."

(The brackets are in the original. "Beyond the Door," by J. Paul Suter, was in the April 1923 issue of Weird Tales.) As for the identity of M. Humphreys, it would be hard to discover one without having a first name.

Herman Sisk (Dates unknown)--There was a Herman Sisk who lived in Los Angeles, California, and wrote plays and other works. I suspect he was the same Herman Sisk who wrote "The Purple Heart," a short short story about a haunted cabin.

F.K. Moss (Dates unknown)--F.K. Moss' story is called "The Death Cell." There is a framing device again, in this case an introduction by one character followed by a manuscript by another. And now I have to say that reading or simply glancing through these early issues of Weird Tales becomes pretty tiresome, with the same kinds of stories, themes, motifs, devices, and settings, very often with the same kind of writing style, over and over again. You wonder where was the imagination. But then you have to admit to yourself that Weird Tales--and in a larger sense, weird fiction--was just beginning in 1923. It would take awhile before things got good.

F. Walter Wilson (Dates unknown)--I found a reference to an F. Walter Wilson who was a newspaperman in Boston and who may have had a connection to Quebec. The story "The Thunder Voice" is set in Quebec, and so we have another story of Canada. There is also a  found manuscript in the story. The blurb reads: "The Story of a Hairy Monster." That's an intriguing thing for those interested in cryptozoology. The hairy monster of the story might be a gorilla or a wild-man or possibly a Bigfoot creature before it was so named. I'm not sure.

William Merrit (Dates unknown)--William Merrit is going to be hard to find in any online search because of the similarity of his name to that of William Merritt Chase (1849-1916), a well-known painter from Indiana. Merritt's story is called "The Finale," but it's not the last story in the May 1923 issue of Weird Tales. That position goes to . . .

"The Closed Cabinet" by _____ _____, a very long short story written by an anonymous author and reproduced in the tiniest of fonts, all to make it fit, I guess, in the smaller number of pages in the May issue than in the previous two of Weird Tales.

William F. Heitman's illustration for "The Floor Above" by M. Humphreys in Weird Tales, May 1923.

Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

? ? ?-The First Anonymous Story

There are two kinds of anonymous works. First are works written by some unknown person or persons, often in the distant past, but sometimes today, too, things written for example on subway walls and tenement halls. "The Twa Corbies," a traditional ballad reprinted in Weird Tales in February 1926, is an example of an anonymous work from the distant past.

The second kind of anonymous work is one whose author wishes to remain unknown. Somebody somewhere knows who wrote it, but the reader doesn't. "The Young Man Who Wanted to Die," from Weird Tales, March 1923, is a short story of the second kind. The author used triple question marks--? ? ?--as his or her byline, but only so the reader would not know his or her identity. Edwin Baird, editor of Weird Tales, probably knew who the author was. They probably sat together in his office and hashed out the idea, for "The Young Man Who Wanted to Die" is more than just a simple anonymous work, as we'll see. There is actually a kind of meta-anonymity in the story and its authorship.

It seems likely to me that "The Young Man Who Wanted to Die" was written by someone who had another story in that first issue of Weird Tales. The idea was to avoid having more than one story by a given author in any one issue of a magazine. That was a common practice in the pulp magazine business. It's one of the reasons that there were so many pseudonyms used. Readers liked their favorite authors, but they also liked variety. Maybe more bylines made for better sales.

"The Young Man Who Wanted to Die" is set in Chicago. Its author was probably also a Chicagoan. In reading the story, I came upon a word I had never encountered before, "scarehead." According to Merriam-Webster, it means "a big, sensational, or alarming newspaper headline." There's no guarantee here, but maybe the author worked in or was familiar with the newspaper business, or more generally the writing business.

"The Young Man Who Wanted to Die" is in five episodes. In the first, an unnamed young man, living in "a miserable, two-dollar-a-week bedroom in a Chicago lodging-house," prepares to kill himself. He will use gas to do it, but before completing the deed, he sits down to write a suicide note. Why is he doing this thing? As the French say, cherchez la femme. Beyond that, he has always wanted to know what is on the other side. He more or less identifies as a dead person. In pursuit of that knowledge, he has read every book about Theosophy and related subjects, attended meetings of psychic societies, and studied psychology. (His mother would have told him, "Go to church.") Still, he is unsatisfied.

The woman is named Lily May. She is named. He is not. Lilies symbolize lots of things--femininity, fertility, love, purity, devotion. They also symbolize rejuvenation and a restoration of innocence. Lilies are commonly used as funeral flowers. Lily May proves to be the young man's flower after his near-death experience. As for May: we are currently in the month of May. Look out your window. That's all the explanation you'll need as to why she's called May.

The second episode is brief. It describes the young man's near-death experience in which there is "a dazzling golden light" and a vision of a girl on a throne, "clothed in a virginal robe." The young man is then swept away in episodes three and four into a strange, out-of-body odyssey through eons and worlds. There are phantasmagoric visions and encounters with monsters. Finally he comes to a place in which monstrous, ravenous, venomous serpents do battle with each other. One triumphs over the others--and then turns its attentions to him . . .

He awakes. He is in a hospital. His nurse soothes him. He babbles to her. You can guess who she is. The last episode concludes with a brief newspaper item about him, about how he was found and saved from death, and about how he arrived in the care of his nurse, "who seems to know the young man" but declines to identify him. He remains anonymous.

"The Young Man Who Wanted to Die" is by an anonymous author, but it's not as simple as that. Within the story itself, there is also anonymity. "I've destroyed every clue to my identity," writes the young man in his suicide note. That comes near the beginning. At the end, the nurse maintains his anonymity. The brief newspaper item that closes the story--also by an anonymous author--reads:

An unidentified youth attempted to take his life in a North Side rooming-house last night by inhaling gas. The landlady smelled the odor of gas and called the police. Miss Lily May Kettering, a nurse at the National Emergency Hospital, who seems to know the young man, although refusing to divulge his identity, reports that he is on the road to recovery.

All of that makes me think that "The Young Man Who Wanted to Die" is kind of a gimmick. The author's name was probably elsewhere in the first issue of Weird Tales, but there's reason to believe that he wrote this story anonymously because the whole thing is about anonymity. If you're trying to avoid having a single byline occur more than once in your magazine, this is a clever way to do it.

So we have an author who was probably known to the editor, probably from Chicago, and probably in the writing business. He wrote anonymously. He also included in his story an anonymously written newspaper item. In his altered state of consciousness, the young man has strange visions and makes a strange journey through time and space. He approaches death but is saved from it by an intervention. (The last word the young man speaks in his vision is "God.") And in the end, he gets the girl. In other words, there is a happy, sentimental, Hollywood-movie-type ending. So where have we seen all of these things before, not only to do with the story but also with its author? The obvious answer is Otis Adelbert Kline and his previous story, "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes," also in his anonymous authorship of news-based items in Detective Tales.

So was ? ? ? Otis Adelbert Kline. The answer is: ? ? ?

* * *

Firsts in "The Young Man Who Wanted to Die":

• The first anonymously written story in Weird Tales.
• The first occurrence of the word Cimmerian in Weird Tales. (It's used as an adjective, not as a noun.)
• The first story with a title as a variation of "The Man Who . . ."

I noticed a long time ago that there are lots of stories with titles beginning with "The Man Who . . " I didn't know that there were so many, though. In consulting T.G.L. Cockcroft's Index to the Weird Fiction Magazines (1962),  I find that there are thirty-five "The Man Who . . ." stories. If I count right, thirty-one of those are in Weird Tales. There is also of course "The Young Man Who Wanted to Die" by ? ? ? (Mar. 1923), as well as "The Two Men Who Murdered Each Other" by Valma Clark (July-Aug. 1923). That makes at least thirty-three stories in Weird Tales of "The Man Who . . ." type.

That construction goes back a long way. The earliest example I know of is in "The Man Who Would Be King" by Rudyard Kipling, which was published in 1888. And maybe that's all it took. H.G. Wells, an admirer of Kipling's story, had his own story called "The Man Who Could Work Miracles" published in The Illustrated London News in 1898. There were and are many, many more, and I'm sure there are more to come.

The Man Who Fell to Earth by Walter Tevis in the Lancer edition, 1970, originally published in 1963. Cover art by Howard Winters.

Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Nonfiction Fillers in the First Issue

There are six nonfiction fillers in the first issue of Weird Tales. All were written anonymously. They are:

• "Queer Tribes of Savages Found in Africa" (p. 130)
• "African Brides Must Be Plump" (p. 130)
• "Ten Pallbearers for This Mammoth Woman" (p. 149)
• "Woman Starves to Feed Her Cats" (p. 149)
• "Unearth Vast Wealth in Egyptian Tomb" (p. 155)
• "'Evil Demon' Drives Man to Orgy of Crime" (p. 160)

"Queer Tribes of Africa" is about the El Molo people of East Africa. "African Brides Must Be Plump" is also about Africa, but it's about a general cultural practice and lacks specifics.

The next two articles are about women in New York City. Mrs. Martha Carmas of Middle Village, Queensboro, New York, is the subject of "Ten Pallbearers for This Enormous Woman." Mrs. Carmas, aged thirty-three, died on January 7, 1923, after having contracted elephantiasis. She weighed 710 pounds at her death. According to a contemporary newspaper article, "A coffin shipping case was used [to carry the body], as the basket coffins in which bodies are usually carried to the undertaking establishments were to [sic] small." (Source: "Builds Huge Coffin for Woman of 710 Pounds" in Lenoir (North Carolina) News-Topic, February 1, 1923, page 8.) The title of Herbert J. Mangham's story "The Basket" refers to just such a basket coffin. One remarkable thing about this brief article in Weird Tales is its immediacy: it was put into print and was on the newsstand about a month or so after the original story first appeared in American newspapers.

"Woman Starves to Feed Her Cats" was also immediate. On January 8, 1923, Mary Bosanti of Avenue S, Brooklyn, New York, was found by neighbors in her apartment. She was weak and starving, surrounded by more than two hundred empty milk bottles, which she had emptied over days and weeks in order to feed the neighborhood cats. Mary was transported to Bellevue Hospital, and that's the last we hear of her. Today we would call her a crazy cat lady.

"Unearth Vast Wealth in Egyptian Tomb" is the longest of the six articles. It tells about the discovery of the tomb of King Tutankhamen, which had been accomplished in November 1922, almost certainly while the first issue of Weird Tales was in preparation. There aren't any stories about Egypt in the first issue, at least so far in my survey, but there would be, including in the giant-sized triple-issue of May/June/July 1924.

Finally there is "'Evil Demon' Drives Man to Orgy of Crime," which tells of Estanislao Puyat, a twenty-nine-year-old Filipino who went on a rampage after being spurned in his affections for his eighteen-year-old niece. Puyat's attack took place in Manila sometime in the month of November 1922. He was said to have been "de malas," that is, possessed by a demon. Puyat didn't know what had come over him. He was afterwards pronounced sane. The poor niece, however, was paralyzed after having been thrown from a window.

Someone associated with Weird Tales was watching the newspapers in the months leading up to the publication of that first issue. It was the kind of thing Charles Fort would have done, but Robert Ripley, creator of Believe It or Not!, was also in that business. We know that Otis Adelbert Kline was, too, for it was he who wrote true crime fillers for Detective Tales, the companion magazine of Weird Tales, in the issues of September and October 1922 at least. The source for that information is a compilation called "Curious Crimes: A Collection of Factual Fillers," in The Compleat OAK Leaves: The Official Journal of Otis Adelbert Kline and His Works (Clayton, GA: A Fictioneer Facsimile Edition, 1980; Issue No. 12, pages 9-11). The editor of OAK Leaves, the late David Anthony Kraft, introduced the compilation, letting us know that Kline's records indicate that he was in fact the author of those otherwise anonymous articles. Kline was a reader of manuscripts for Weird Tales, and he edited the aforementioned giant-sized first-anniversary issue of Weird Tales, dated May/June/July 1924. (See the image below.) He is known to have written anonymously, for the essay "Why Weird Tales?" was his. Considering all of that, I don't think there's any better candidate for authorship of the six nonfiction fillers in the first issue of Weird Tales.

Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

The Twa Corbies by Anonymous

"The Twa Corbies" ("The Two Crows") is an old and anonymous poem, anonymous in the truest sense of the word, meaning that its author was not trying to hide his or her identity. Instead, the author's name was never recorded and will simply never be known. It seems likely to me that, being a traditional ballad, "The Twa Corbies" is not in its present form the work of just one person but the result of being passed on from one to another. Call it a case of transcription error except that no one knows what was the best version of the poem. Maybe we have the best version after all.

From the Wikipedia article "The Three Ravens":

Written in the Scots language, there is no record of how early "The Twa Corbies" [was] first performed. [Francis James] Child (I, 253) quotes [sic] a letter from Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe to Walter Scott (August 8, 1802): "The song of 'The Twa Corbies' was given to me by Miss Erskine of Alva (now Mrs Kerr), who, I think, said that she had written it down from the recitation of an old woman at Alva." [W]hich [evidence] indicates it was already known in Scotland at that date. It was first published in Walter Scott's Minstrelsy in 1812.

(Boldface added.)

"The Twa Corbies" was reprinted a century later in Ballads Weird and Wonderful (1912), illustrated by Vernon Hill (1887-1972). Maybe that was the source for its reprinting in Weird Tales in February 1926.

Below is an illustration for "The Twa Corbies," made by Arthur Rackham (1867-1939). Below that is a reproduction of the original page from the February 1926 issue of Weird Tales.

It's a grim and bitter and ironic poem. It appears to have been based on an earlier ballad, "The Three Ravens," from 1611 or before.

Original text copyright 2022, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Anonymous

Anonymous is one of the most prolific authors the world has ever known. He and she have written, drawn, painted, and composed countless works. Not surprisingly, Anonymous contributed to Weird Tales as well. Some of those articles, stories, and poems were probably the work of editors or their associates. Others may have been by writers who did not want their names appearing in a pulp magazine. In any case, here is a list of works by that most mysterious of authors:

Anonymous' Works in Weird Tales

"The Young Man Who Wanted to Die" (Mar. 1923)

"The Closed Cabinet" (May 1923)

"A Soulless Resurrection" (Nov. 1924)

"The Twa Corbies" (a traditional poem, Feb. 1926)

"In Memoriam: Henry St. Clair Whitehead" (article, Mar. 1933)

"From Ghoulies and Ghoosties" (old Cornish litany and part of Virgil Finlay's poetry series, Feb. 1938)
"The Black Art--From Its Birth to Blackout" (article, July 1940)

"Clark Ashton Smith--His Life and Letters" (article, Mar. 1942)

Anonymous' Works in Oriental Stories

"The Tale of Annaya" (Spring 1932)

It's worth noting that most of these works came early in the tenure of a given editor. An editor pressed for time and in need of content might easily turn to his or her own work or the work of friends or associates in order to fill the gaps.

Copyright 2011, 2023 Terence E. Hanley