Potrzebie
Wednesday, August 06, 2008
Charles Van Doren and the Rip in the Fabric of Reality
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Charles Van Doren finally surfaced at last with his side of the quiz show scandals in an engaging essay, “All the Answers” (The New Yorker, July 28). That long-awaited memoir prompts me to dust off the 23-year-old article you see below.
In 1985 I began writing a letter to Paul Williams' Philip K. Dick Society Newsletter, but as I typed on the IBM Selectric, the letter expanded and began to seem more like an article. With that in mind, I gave it a title and submitted it as an article. I sent the only copy to Paul, who never published it. However, instead of returning the only copy to me, he sent it to the reader whose comment about the 1968 movie Project X ("sure sounds like Time Out of Joint") had prompted my article (dated May 5, 1985). Years passed, and I thought of it as a lost article. Then miraculously, it appeared on the Internet during the 1990s, and I grabbed it. Here it is (with some alterations)…
Several films have “fake construct” plots similar to Philip K. Dick’s Time Out of Joint, and some may have been directly inspired by Dick’s novel.
In William Castle’s Project X (1968) agent Hagen Arnold (Christopher George), in the year 2118, has a message that Sino-Asia will wipe out the West in 14 days, but details of the weaponry are not available when Arnold returns to the USA with his memory erased. A scientific team, under the direction of Dr. Crowther (Henry Jones), in hopes of getting the weapon information, constructs a fake 1960s environment and makes Arnold believe he is living in that period. To keep Arnold in the construct area, he is given the false knowledge that he is a bank robber, hiding out with other gang members at an isolated farmhouse. In reality, the other members of the gang are Crowther and his team.
Karen Summers (Greta Baldwin) unexpectedly turns up in the construct area, creating rips in the fake reality fabric, and another agent, Gregory Gallea (Monte Markham), also returns from Sino-Asia. Crowther turns his attentions to Gallea as a possible solution to the mystery weapon, but Gallea is destroyed by a mass of subconscious "brain energy." Although the Sinoese plan never works, it is revealed that the secret weapon is Hagen Arnold himself. He is a carrier of plague germs.
The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film entry failed to point out that Project X is of interest to animation buffs because the animated Hanna-Barbera sequence was designed by comics illustrator Alex Toth who worked on much of the Hanna-Barbera output between 1964 and 1968 (Johnny Quest, Space Ghost, Herculoids). The screenplay for Project X was by Edmund Morris, who earlier did the screenplay adaptation of Nelson Algren's A Walk On The Wild Side (1962).
Charles Van Doren, Jack Barry and Herb Stempel on Twenty-One. Assistants on the show were the identical twins Arlene and Ardell Terry. Page from Humbug by Will Elder and Harvey Kurtzman.
Charles Van Doren finally surfaced at last with his side of the quiz show scandals in an engaging essay, “All the Answers” (The New Yorker, July 28). That long-awaited memoir prompts me to dust off the 23-year-old article you see below.
In 1985 I began writing a letter to Paul Williams' Philip K. Dick Society Newsletter, but as I typed on the IBM Selectric, the letter expanded and began to seem more like an article. With that in mind, I gave it a title and submitted it as an article. I sent the only copy to Paul, who never published it. However, instead of returning the only copy to me, he sent it to the reader whose comment about the 1968 movie Project X ("sure sounds like Time Out of Joint") had prompted my article (dated May 5, 1985). Years passed, and I thought of it as a lost article. Then miraculously, it appeared on the Internet during the 1990s, and I grabbed it. Here it is (with some alterations)…
Several films have “fake construct” plots similar to Philip K. Dick’s Time Out of Joint, and some may have been directly inspired by Dick’s novel.In William Castle’s Project X (1968) agent Hagen Arnold (Christopher George), in the year 2118, has a message that Sino-Asia will wipe out the West in 14 days, but details of the weaponry are not available when Arnold returns to the USA with his memory erased. A scientific team, under the direction of Dr. Crowther (Henry Jones), in hopes of getting the weapon information, constructs a fake 1960s environment and makes Arnold believe he is living in that period. To keep Arnold in the construct area, he is given the false knowledge that he is a bank robber, hiding out with other gang members at an isolated farmhouse. In reality, the other members of the gang are Crowther and his team.
Karen Summers (Greta Baldwin) unexpectedly turns up in the construct area, creating rips in the fake reality fabric, and another agent, Gregory Gallea (Monte Markham), also returns from Sino-Asia. Crowther turns his attentions to Gallea as a possible solution to the mystery weapon, but Gallea is destroyed by a mass of subconscious "brain energy." Although the Sinoese plan never works, it is revealed that the secret weapon is Hagen Arnold himself. He is a carrier of plague germs.The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film entry failed to point out that Project X is of interest to animation buffs because the animated Hanna-Barbera sequence was designed by comics illustrator Alex Toth who worked on much of the Hanna-Barbera output between 1964 and 1968 (Johnny Quest, Space Ghost, Herculoids). The screenplay for Project X was by Edmund Morris, who earlier did the screenplay adaptation of Nelson Algren's A Walk On The Wild Side (1962).
Project X was adapted from two novels by British sf/thriller/fantasy/horror writer Leslie P. Davies - Psychogeist (1966) and The Artificial Man (1965), with the latter providing the main Dickian-like plotline of the film, the secret agent in a fake construct environment.
The Groundstar Conspiracy (1972), also with an amnesiac agent, was adapted from Davies' The Alien (1968), and his first novel, The Paper Dolls (1964), became a 1968 made-for-tv movie with the same title. The Science Fiction Encyclopedia notes that The Artificial Man and Davies' Man Out Of Nowhere (aka Who Is Lewis Pinder?) are "both possible delusional-frame tales."
When Stuart Lowery, in chapter three of Time Out of Joint, arrives at Ragle's house to discuss Ragle's contest entries ("I know it's just an oversight on your part..."). the scene is remarkably similar to the manner in which quiz show contestants were prompted in advance. Some contestants were visited in their homes by producers and asked questions, but they were not always told that these same questions would later be asked when the show went on the air. On other cases, such as Xavier Cugat's appearances as an art expert on The $64,000 Question, questions would be drawn from a background file on the contestant and written to fit what was known about the contestant's scope of knowledge. Other contestants knew they were participating in fraud, and while one or two later revealed they came close to exposing the fraud on the air during live shows, no one ever did.
One contestant, Arthur Cohn who appeared on The $64,000 Challenge (3/23/58), did write a letter exposing the show, mimeographed it and mailed it to 25 of his friends. But most were like Ragle Gumm; "This was the secret compact between himself and the contest people... No one else, to his knowledge, had this privilege. It was for the one simple purpose of keeping him in the contest... it was his secret and the contest people's secret. And neither of them had any motive to air it publicly."
Sponsored by Revlon, The $64,000 Question began 6/8/55. Revlon's sales soared. At the Subcommittee hearings investigating quiz shows, Revlon vice-president of advertising George Abrams gave a sworn statement: "The primary purpose of the meeting was to keep the ratings high, or raise them, and so, consistent with this purpose, a great deal of time was devoted to discussing the destiny of a contestant... " And Ragle, unaware of how he is being manipulated, "had become valuable from the standpoint of publicity. Why the public would want the same person to win over and over again he did not know. Obviously, if he won he won over the other contenders. But that was the manner of the public mind. They recognized his name. As it was explained to him, the theory went that the public liked to see a name they could identify. They resisted change."
In chapter two, when Bill Black and Ragle examine the Gazette with its "line of photos of men and women" who were contest winners, the description matches the visual layouts of quiz show winners seen in 1956-57 magazines and newspapers. Although PKD never mentions the quiz shows in Time Out of Joint, one passage in chapter two almost heads in that direction: "Costs ran higher - he had figured one day - than the famous Old Gold contest of the mid-thirties or the perennial 'I use Oxydol soap because in 25 words or less' contests. But evidently it built circulation, in these times when the average man read comic books and watched..." Watched what? Well, back then, everyone was watching the quiz shows. So, after the ellipsis, PKD veered in another direction: "I'm getting like Bill Black, Ragle thought. Knocking TV. It's a national pastime in itself." He took a detour to avoid getting too close to his springboard source, the television quiz shows.
The Groundstar Conspiracy (1972), also with an amnesiac agent, was adapted from Davies' The Alien (1968), and his first novel, The Paper Dolls (1964), became a 1968 made-for-tv movie with the same title. The Science Fiction Encyclopedia notes that The Artificial Man and Davies' Man Out Of Nowhere (aka Who Is Lewis Pinder?) are "both possible delusional-frame tales."
©WMG
Project X gets favorable coverage in John Stanley's Creature Feature Movie Guide and the British Film Institute's Monthly Film Bulletin, but Robin Cross in The Big Book of B Movies (St. Martin's, 1981) comments that Hagen Arnold's "need to lie low allows Castle the maximum use of the cheapest possible location, although it puts some strain on the creaking plot. The scientist guardians, moving around uneasily in their 1960s clothes, have received only the sketchiest of briefings: the female member has no idea what you do with a potato. Nevertheless, our hero, who just happens to be an expert on the history of the 1960s, remains too befuddled to penetrate the transparent deception." An excellent still from Project X, apparently from the hallucinatory sequence, can be seen in The Big Book Of B Movies.
George Seaton's 36 Hours (1964), in which James Garner comes out of a coma in a fake Allied hospital set up by the Nazis, is based on Roald Dahl's "Beware of the Dog," plus a story by Carl K. Hittleman and Luis H. Vance. Another related story, possibly one PKD could have read, is "4th Degree," illustrated by Jack Kamen and written by Otto Binder for EC's Weird Science-Fantasy (January- February 1955) and obviously influenced heavily by George Orwell: Val Draper, in the repressive world of 2039, finds forbidden "books... among the ruins" and then travels back to 1954 to spread a warning about the dictatorship of the future, holding a press conference in his 1954 hospital room. However, it's a fake; everyone around him is involved in the deception. Draper is convicted of treason and shot.
Based on internal evidence, the fakery on the 1950s rigged television quiz shows was Philip K. Dick’s springboard to plot Time Out of Joint, and references to such are buried throughout the novel. In chapter two, when Vic calls Ragle Gumm "the Charles Van Doren of the newspaper contests," Ragle responds, "I consider that a compliment."
Dick wrote Time Out of Joint in the winter of 1957-58, sent it to Lippincott (April 1958), where it was purchased July 1958 and published in the spring of 1959. Like Ragle, the quiz show contestants who won week after week were celebrities, and the most famous was Van Doren, who appeared on NBC's Twenty-One beginning November 1956, replacing contestant Herb Stempel. The show was promoted that week by NBC with spots asking, "Will Herb Stempel crack the $100,000 mark?" Ragle's contest asked, "Where will the Little Green Man be next?"
Van Doren appeared on the front cover of the February 11, 1957 issue of Time, and he remained on Twenty-One until March. Although the quiz show scandals did not take off until charges by Stempel were published August 28, 1958, there were hints throughout 1957, beginning with a January Variety story about Dale Logue's suit against The Big Surprise and her claim that it was not "a true test of skill."
After Time asked, "Are the quiz shows rigged?" (4/22/57), Look (8/20/57) asked, "Are the TV Quiz Shows Fixed?" and then answered, "It may be more accurate to say that they are controlled or partially controlled." The New York Times (12/57) stated, "Despite diligent research, nobody has yet turned up evidence that the fix is in on any of the big money quizzes."
Then, on 8/16/58 there was the mysterious cancellation of Dotto by CBS, followed by Stempel's 8/28/58 charges (which suddenly brought Van Doren under suspicion), a denial on Twenty-One (9/8/58) by the show's host and co-producer Jack Barry, a grand jury investigation of the quiz shows (beginning 9/17/58), a press conference (9/27/58) by contestant Richard Snodgrass who stated he had been supplied with answers on Twenty-One, a statement (10/10/58) by Van Doren that he "had not been given questions or answers," and the cancellation (10/17/58) of Twenty-One. On 1/20/59 Jack Barry and his co-producer Dan Enright refused to testify before the grand jury. These were the events prior to the publication of Time Out of Joint. There were other behind-the-scenes events, but the sequence above is what surfaced in the media.
Then, on 8/16/58 there was the mysterious cancellation of Dotto by CBS, followed by Stempel's 8/28/58 charges (which suddenly brought Van Doren under suspicion), a denial on Twenty-One (9/8/58) by the show's host and co-producer Jack Barry, a grand jury investigation of the quiz shows (beginning 9/17/58), a press conference (9/27/58) by contestant Richard Snodgrass who stated he had been supplied with answers on Twenty-One, a statement (10/10/58) by Van Doren that he "had not been given questions or answers," and the cancellation (10/17/58) of Twenty-One. On 1/20/59 Jack Barry and his co-producer Dan Enright refused to testify before the grand jury. These were the events prior to the publication of Time Out of Joint. There were other behind-the-scenes events, but the sequence above is what surfaced in the media.
Surely PKD must have been fascinated with this manipulated reality. In Reflections In A Bloodshot Eye (1975) Robert Metz quotes an unnamed "quiz-show entrepreneur... who never went into the business of producing big-money shows": "Anybody who knew anything about this business had to understand that you couldn't maintain that kind of hyperbolic drama with real people without fixing the shows... It became unbelievable that a person who had no money at all would risk, say, $8000. To build the suspense, you had to screw around with reality... The money for the producers came from success, the successful attempts to fake reality: building tension artificially, taking advantage of the public's willingness to believe it's all real, suggesting that a penniless old shoemaker would risk all that money."
When Stuart Lowery, in chapter three of Time Out of Joint, arrives at Ragle's house to discuss Ragle's contest entries ("I know it's just an oversight on your part..."). the scene is remarkably similar to the manner in which quiz show contestants were prompted in advance. Some contestants were visited in their homes by producers and asked questions, but they were not always told that these same questions would later be asked when the show went on the air. On other cases, such as Xavier Cugat's appearances as an art expert on The $64,000 Question, questions would be drawn from a background file on the contestant and written to fit what was known about the contestant's scope of knowledge. Other contestants knew they were participating in fraud, and while one or two later revealed they came close to exposing the fraud on the air during live shows, no one ever did.One contestant, Arthur Cohn who appeared on The $64,000 Challenge (3/23/58), did write a letter exposing the show, mimeographed it and mailed it to 25 of his friends. But most were like Ragle Gumm; "This was the secret compact between himself and the contest people... No one else, to his knowledge, had this privilege. It was for the one simple purpose of keeping him in the contest... it was his secret and the contest people's secret. And neither of them had any motive to air it publicly."
Sponsored by Revlon, The $64,000 Question began 6/8/55. Revlon's sales soared. At the Subcommittee hearings investigating quiz shows, Revlon vice-president of advertising George Abrams gave a sworn statement: "The primary purpose of the meeting was to keep the ratings high, or raise them, and so, consistent with this purpose, a great deal of time was devoted to discussing the destiny of a contestant... " And Ragle, unaware of how he is being manipulated, "had become valuable from the standpoint of publicity. Why the public would want the same person to win over and over again he did not know. Obviously, if he won he won over the other contenders. But that was the manner of the public mind. They recognized his name. As it was explained to him, the theory went that the public liked to see a name they could identify. They resisted change."
Like Van Doren, a photo of Ragle is on the front cover of Time. When Ragle looks for patterns and contradictions (chapter five) in the magazines found in the ruins, he breaks the information into categories: "He had set up 12 categories: politics, economics, movies, art, crime, fashions, science, etc." Contestants on The $64,000 Question chose a category from 12 categories posted on a checkerboard design. Curiously, this was one of the few obvious "reality leaks" on the show revealing something fishy: A viewer, carefully studying the checkerboard weekly during the brief moments it was seen, could soon deduce that the categories were changed depending on the knowledge areas of new contestants; in effect, this made the "choosing" of a category so transparent it became a meaningless act.
In chapter two, when Bill Black and Ragle examine the Gazette with its "line of photos of men and women" who were contest winners, the description matches the visual layouts of quiz show winners seen in 1956-57 magazines and newspapers. Although PKD never mentions the quiz shows in Time Out of Joint, one passage in chapter two almost heads in that direction: "Costs ran higher - he had figured one day - than the famous Old Gold contest of the mid-thirties or the perennial 'I use Oxydol soap because in 25 words or less' contests. But evidently it built circulation, in these times when the average man read comic books and watched..." Watched what? Well, back then, everyone was watching the quiz shows. So, after the ellipsis, PKD veered in another direction: "I'm getting like Bill Black, Ragle thought. Knocking TV. It's a national pastime in itself." He took a detour to avoid getting too close to his springboard source, the television quiz shows.
The category board of The $64,000 Question can be seen in the album cover for Columbia's $64,000 Jazz LP, but even this is a fake. A close inspection of the record jacket reveals the word "jazz" was not on the category board but was pasted into a blank square by the production artist of the album cover. The album featured Pete Rugolo's "The Shrike." Click heading at top to hear the beginning of this Rugolo track (but it will not start automatically). The tune was composed by José Ferrer who won a Tony for The Shrike on Broadway and then directed and starred in the 1955 film adaptation.
Joy Page and José Ferrer in The Shrike (1955). Joy Page died three months ago on April 18. Her son is the documentary filmmaker Gregory Orr.
Labels: binder, cbs, kamen, nbc, philip k. dick, pkd, quiz, time, van doren, willis howard
¶ 2:56 PM 2 comments
Friday, January 04, 2008
What a Long, Weird Trip It's Been
By Bhob Stewart
Much like the white stuff in the middle of an Oreo cookie, the magazine Weird Tales lies strangely sandwiched between cartoon magazines and comic books. To probe exactly what this odd statement means, one must pay attention to the men behind the curtain, notably Jacob Clark Henneberger and William J. Delaney, Sr., who kept Weird Tales racked on newsstands over many decades.
The life of Bill Delaney (1892-1986), publisher of Weird Tales, Short Stories and World Astrology, parallels the history of popular fiction during the 20th Century. During the years Delaney published Weird Tales (1938-54), with Farnsworth Wright and Dorothy McIlwraith as his editors, the magazine introduced the highly stylized cover illustrations of Hannes Bok and published the earliest stories of Fritz Leiber and Ray Bradbury. Six of the Bradbury stories published by Delaney later became memorable adaptations in EC Comics, illustrated by Jack Davis, George Evans, Graham Ingels, Jack Kamen and Joe Orlando: "There Was an Old Woman" (Tales from the Crypt 34 from the July 1944 issue of Weird Tales); "The Lake" (Vault of Horror 31 from the May 1944 Weird Tales); "Let's Play Poison" (Vault 29 from Weird Tales, November 1946); "The Handler" (Crypt 36 from Weird Tales, January 1947); "The October Game" (Shock SuspenStories 9 from Weird Tales, March 1948); "The Black Ferris" (Haunt of Fear 18 from Weird Tales, May 1948).
During the early 1950s, when the 279-issue continuous run of Weird Tales was winding down, a glance at a newsstand revealed the magazine's strong influence on comic books. In a 1980 paperback revival of Weird Tales, Lin Carter wrote, "I can think of no other magazine in history which exerted quite the same sort of influence which Weird Tales exerted over the genre it shaped and perfected, and the authors who contributed to it so devotedly over the years... And there can have been very few fiction magazines in the history of publishing which have had as many of their stories dramatized on radio, television and in the movies."
In addition to the EC adaptations, the magazine provided a source for other graphic story adaptations, such as Robert Bloch's "The Shambler from the Stars" (Weird Tales, June 1935), illustrated by Jim Starlin and Tom Palmer for Marvel's Journey into Mystery 3 (February 1973). Only occasionally did periodical publishers put the word "weird" into magazine mastheads, yet within the comic book field, Weird Tales spawned a seemingly endless parade of weirdness: Weird (1966), Weird Adventures (1951), Weird Chills (1954), Weird Comics (1940), Weird Fantasy (1950), Weird Horrors (1952), Weird Mysteries (1952), Weird Mystery Tales (1972), Weird Science (1950), Weird Science-Fantasy (1954), Weird Science-Fantasy Annual (1953-54), Weird SuspenStories (the Canadian reprint of Crime SuspenStories), Weird Suspense (1975), Weird Tales of the Future (1952), Weird Tales of the Macabre (1975), Weird Terror (1952), Weird Thrillers (1951), Weird War Tales (1971), Weird Western Tales (1972), Weird Wonder Tales (1973) and Weird Worlds (1970).
Pinpointing Delaney's role in all this, one must back-pedal to publications of the 19th Century. With a focus on reprints, translations and classics, Short Stories was launched in 1890. After it was purchased in 1910 by Doubleday, it was converted into a 160-page all-fiction pulp adventure magazine featuring stories by Max Brand, Talbot Mundy, Sax Rohmer, Edgar Wallace and others. Born in Brooklyn two years after the first issue of Short Stories, Delaney served during World War I in France with the United States Marine Corps, returned to New York after the war and entered the advertising field as a salesman. In 1937, Delaney bought Short Stories from Doubleday, and the magazine's base of operations moved to his office at 9 Rockefeller Plaza.
When Delaney acquired Short Stories, he also acquired its editor, Dorothy McIlwraith, who had worked for Doubleday for 20 years. A native of Canada, McIlwraith became one of the higher paid pulp editors while working for Delaney. Leo Margulies, at Standard Magazines, ranked highest with $250 a week, but most pulp editors took home weekly salaries of $50 to $75. Delaney employed McIlwraith at $100 a week.
Frank Gruber, in The Pulp Jungle, described his 1937 encounter with McIlwraith: "I knew that Short Stories was virtually a closed market, but I took the Argosy reject in to Short Stories. I met Dorothy McIlwraith for the first time. She was cool, formal, not too encouraging, as she had a stable of excellent, regular writers. I gave her one of my finest sales pitches, told her I had to have two cents a word, that the editors of Argosy and Adventure were laying siege at my door, but I liked Short Stories so much that I preferred to have my work in it. I later became so well acquainted with Dorothy McIlwraith that we frequently discussed this first meeting of ours. I would guess that Dorothy was 52 or 53 years of age at this time... She was a heavy-set woman who had never married. She lived in a small house on Long Island with another spinster. She was an excellent editor. The day after my all-out sales pitch, Dorothy telephoned me. She agreed with all that I had told her and was buying the story at my price of two cents a word! I promptly wrote a second story for Dorothy, which she also bought for two cents a word. Then I plunged into the novelettes that dominated the magazine for the next several years."
In 1938, Delaney's company, Short Stories Inc., also began to publish Weird Tales from the 9 Rockefeller Plaza office. The magazine had been published previously for 15 years in Indianapolis and Chicago before it was bought by Delaney. The origin of Weird Tales is curiously linked with cartoon humor magazines, including the Fawcett publication, Captain Billy's Whiz-Bang, a title which served as a springboard in 1940 for key Fawcett names and titles -- Captain Marvel, Billy Batson, Whiz Comics and Slam Bang Comics.
The founder and original publisher of Weird Tales was Jacob Clark Henneberger. In 1916, Henneberger was a student at a Virginia military academy where he attended English literature classes taught by Captain Stevens. Each semester Stevens gave an hour-long lecture, "Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque," covering various writers influenced by Poe. What Henneberger learned in that class stayed with him as he entered publishing with The Collegiate World. The magazine attracted few advertisers until Henneberger decided to expand "The Area of Good Feelings," a section of excerpts from college humor magazines. When these pages were developed into an entire publication, College Humor was born. In 1920, College Humor sold out its first print run of 50,000 and went back to press for another 15,000.
Henneberger was acquainted with Wilford H. "Captain Billy" Fawcett, who had returned from WWI to Robbinsdale, Minnesota, where he began producing a small mimeographed newsletter of military banter and jokes, circulated among the disabled at the local veterans' hospital in 1920. After distribution by a wholesaler to drugstores and hotel lobbies, the cartoon-joke publication increased its circulation and upgraded to a saddle-stitched, digest-size format. By 1923, it had a circulation of 425,000 with $500,000 annual profits. The title Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, combining Fawcett's name with the nickname of a destructive WWI artillery shell, is immortalized in the lyrics to the song "Trouble" from Meredith Willson's The Music Man (1962): "Is there a nicotine stain on his index finger? A dime novel hidden in the corncrib? Is he starting to memorize jokes from Captain Billy's Whiz Bang?" However, this is an anachronistic reference, since The Music Man is set in River City, Iowa during 1912, which was seven years before the first issue was published. The humor magazine often featured a picture of Wilford Fawcett in uniform along with the caption, "This magazine is edited by a Spanish-American and World War veteran and is dedicated to the Fighting Forces of the United States and Canada."
In 1922, Wilford Fawcett's brother, Harvey Fawcett, began publishing a similar gag book when he acquired rights to do the American edition of Calgary Eye-Opener in Minneapolis. This was the publication that launched Carl Barks as a cartoonist in 1928, enabling him to leave the railroad gang and go freelance. Calgary Eye-Opener was taken over by contractor Henry Meyer. Barks recalled, "Meyer was enough of a businessman to see things weren't being run right around there. There was too much drinking and playing around, and not enough production. So he looked over the list of gag men and decided that hell, I was a hard-working son-of-a-gun. So he sent a telegram to me, asking if I would come back there. I had enough money to send a telegram saying I didn't have enough money to get back there. He sent me money, and I closed my affairs very rapidly and gave away the big stack of joke magazines I had. What I could carry in a valise, I carried with me. I got into Minneapolis in November of 1931." Banking $110 a month at his new job, Barks and editor Ed Sumner also attempted to launch another humor magazine, Coo-Coo, in 1932, but it only lasted one issue. In 1935, Barks left for Hollywood and his long association with Walt Disney.
Other small-scale periodicals of the early 1920s were Jim Jam Jems, the saucy Smokehouse Monthly and George Julian Houtain's Home Brew. When the monthly sales of Captain Billy's Whiz Bang reached half a million, Henneberger took note of the rising revenue, imitating Whiz-Bang with The Magazine of Fun. "Soon," wrote Henneberger, "there were a number of these small magazines on the stands, and a number of them provided the capital for further venture. One of them, Home Brew, introduced me to Howard Lovecraft." Lovecraft's "Herbert West – Reanimator" appeared in Home Brew in 1922, the year Henneberger first saw the publication.
Henneberger also published romance pulps, girlie magazines and Detective Tales. In 1922, Henneberger and J.M. Lassinger started their Rural Publishing Corp. and launched the first issue of Weird Tales, dated March 1923. Edited by the Chicago newspaperman and mystery writer Edwin Baird, the magazine had financial problems during its first year. Baird was replaced by Farnsworth Wright after the first 14 issues. "Farnsworth Wright was the second editor of Weird Tales and the man responsible for its longevity," wrote Henneberger. "He was a rare human being who combined a sense of humor with a knowledge of literature and his fellow man. The previous editor, Edwin Baird, assumed the duties of getting out a companion magazine, Detective Tales, as well as Weird Tales." Under Baird, the magazine published such authors as Lovecraft (who appeared in the October 1923 issue with "Dagon"), Clark Ashton Smith and Seabury Quinn. Today, it is Lovecraft who is most strongly identified with Weird Tales, but it was Quinn who was the magazine's most popular writer, with his series about psychic detective Jules de Grandin.
From Home Brew, Henneberger learned that Lovecraft lived in Brooklyn, and he went to see him. "Meeting Lovecraft in Brooklyn was a rare experience," he wrote to Sam Moskowitz, "despite the fact that he was weighted down with marriage problems. He was married to a beautiful White Russian girl, and it seems his work of reviewing and an occasional editing job did not provide the means to support her as she desired. The union was short lived. I tried in vain to get Lovecraft to come to Chicago, but he was tradition bound to New England, especially Rhode Island in which state I called on him a few months before his death. The first story I bought from Howard was 'The Rats in the Walls,' and I think it was one of his finest. However, I sat down with Howard and Harry Houdini one evening while Houdini recounted an experience in Egypt or rather the Giza plateau. A few weeks later Howard submitted the manuscript 'Imprisoned with the Pharaohs.' It was published at my insistence, although Baird did not like it and Wright was not then at the helm of Weird Tales. During this time I was publishing College Humor and The Magazine of Fun successfully... I never made any money with Weird Tales, but the few headaches it caused were compensated by the association with men like William Sprenger (business manager), Farnsworth Wright, Frank Belknap Long, Seabury Quinn (who ran an undertakers' magazine) and many prominent men like Harry Houdini who swore by the publication."
Subtitled "The Unique Magazine" and "a magazine of the bizarre and the unusual," the "early issues were undistinguished," according to The Science Fiction Encyclopedia. After Baird's first 13 issues, a friend of Henneberger's, the songwriter Otis Adelbert Kline (1891-1946), who had written Weird Tales' first serial ("The Thing of a Thousand Shapes"), served briefly as editor (May-July 1924) on the issue planned as the last. "Problems with the printer," wrote Moskowitz, "more than lack of circulation, plunged the early Weird Tales into debt. In order to pay it off, Henneberger sold his profitable Detective Tales."
When the magazine reappeared (November 1924), it had both a new publisher, Popular Fiction Publishing Company, and a new editor, Farnsworth Wright (1888-1940). Born in San Francisco, the musicologist Wright had published an amateur magazine in high school, lived through the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fought in the infantry during WWI before joining Baird as an editorial assistant, beginning with Weird Tales' first issue. For the next 16 years, Wright, who suffered from Parkinson's disease, guided Weird Tales through its peak years, although even at its peak, Weird Tales had no more than 50,000 or so readers.
Between 1930 and 1934 Wright also edited Weird Tales' companion magazine, Oriental Stories (retitled Magic Carpet in January 1933), and his love of Shakespeare prompted an edition of A Midsummer Night's Dream with art by the Weird Tales illustrator Virgil Finlay. Other Weird Tales illustrators of the 1930s included Margaret Brundage, J. Allen St. John, Frank Utpatel, Vincent Napoli (who drew for DS Comics in the late 1940s) and Harold De Lay (artist on 1940-47 comics for Novelty and other companies). Working with pastel chalks, Brundage created a series of controversial, erotic covers.
Wright discovered and nurtured a lengthy list of Weird Tales writers – the poet Leah Bodine Drake, the teenage Tennessee Williams, film producer Val Lewton (Cat People), Henry Kuttner, Robert Bloch, August Derleth, Nictzin Dyalhis, Robert E. Howard, Edmond Hamilton (who scripted for DC Comics from 1945 to 1966), Manly Wade Wellman (who scripted for at least eight comics publishers between 1939 and 1951), Catherine L. Moore, Carl Jacobi, Frank Belknap Long, E. Hoffman Price, H. Warner Munn and Donald Wandrei, while also attracting such authors as Gaston Leroux (Phantom of the Opera), Gustave Meyrink (The Golem), Jack Williamson, Murray Leinster, E.F. Benson, A. Merritt and Algernon Blackwood. Weird Tales first published Robert E. Howard in 1925, and his Conan stories began in WT with "The Phoenix on the Sword" (1932). The 1960s revival of interest in Conan and other Howard characters led to numerous Howard-inspired Marvel Comics.
When Delaney purchased Weird Tales in 1938, he followed the same procedure as he had with McIlwraith and Short Stories, and Wright relocated in New York to continue as the Weird Tales editor. The following summer, the 25-year-old Ray Bradbury showed Wright work by Hannes Bok, cover artist of Bradbury's fanzine, Futuria Fantasia (1939-40). "Long before my appearance in Weird Tales," wrote Bradbury, "I had influenced its artistic makeup. In June 1939, I had traveled across the United States on a Greyhound bus, bringing with me a dozen or so Hannes Bok drawings and paintings. I visited Farnsworth Wright in his offices, and he immediately commissioned Bok to paint a cover for Weird. I returned home on the bus in triumph, delighted that I had brought Bok and my favorite magazine together." The painting illustrated David H. Keller's "Lords of the Ice" (December 1939), and other distinctive Bok covers fronted Weird Tales until 1942. During the 1930s and 1940s, pulp magazine illustrators were usually paid between $50 to $75 for a cover painting.
The issue introducing Bok was one of Wright's last; he died in Jackson Heights, Queens, in June 1940. Delaney chose McIlwraith as Wright's successor, and she continued as Weird Tales' editor for the next 14 years. Bloch had praise for McIlwraith's editorial abilities: "I met Dorothy McIlwraith only once, in late 1939. She seemed pleasant, but I recall little about her, and her letters of acceptance, together with those of associate Lamont Buchanan, don't linger in my memory. Actually, I think she's far too neglected. I can't dismiss anyone who published Bradbury, Sturgeon, Brown and other top talents. I think that she would have published more, had she been given the budget to compete with Unknown Worlds, F&SF and other comparable markets. But that lousy one cent a word – and sometimes bimonthly publication – induced few writers to remain in Weird Tales once better rates were obtainable elsewhere. I lasted longer than most, because I was always a bit stupid. (Still am, writing short stories today when I should be knocking out TV episodes at roughly 100 times the fee, plus an additional 100 times for reruns over the years.) But Weird Tales was my first market, my favorite reading as a young fan, and I felt, and feel, that I owed it a lot."
Delaney and McIlwraith continued to fill the pages of Weird Tales with Derleth, Bloch, Wellman, Hamilton and Quinn, while also introducing Leiber, Bradbury, the now-neglected female fantasist Alison V. Harding, Joseph Payne Brennan and others. In addition to Bok, other illustrators for the Delaney/McIlwraith issues included Lee Brown Coye, Matt Fox (who also illustrated for 1952-63 Marvel Comics and 1967-69 issues of Castle of Frankenstein), Charles A. Kennedy, Boris Dolgov, Fred Humiston, Harold Rayner, Henry del Campo, A.R. Tilburne, John Giunta (who illustrated many comic books from 1938 on), Bill Wayne, Jon Arfstrom and Joseph Krucher.
Frank Gruber (1904-1969), who knocked out some 800,000 words for pulps in 1940, worked just as hard in 1941, but still found time to drop by for weekly chats with McIlwraith and Delaney, as he detailed in The Pulp Jungle: "I don't think I missed an issue of Short Stories that year. If I did not have a serial running in the magazine, I had a long novelette. Bill Delaney, the owner of Short Stories, had become one of my best friends... On Mondays I always went into town... I made a call or two, then about eleven o'clock I would go to the offices of Short Stories. Bill Delaney and I talked awhile, or played a rubber or two of gin rummy, had lunch and returned and played some more gin rummy. About four or four thirty I went home."
When Gruber went home it was to Scarsdale, but in January 1942 he moved to Manhasset, Long Island, where Bill Delaney lived with his wife Margaret (whom he had married in 1923). The Delaney/Gruber friendship was interrupted when Gruber swung a Hollywood deal only weeks after moving to Manhasset. Delaney helped him make his exit. "We decided to close up the house, leave everything in it and take the train to Hollywood, carrying only our suitcases –- and Bob, who was then 22 months of age. I completed The Gift Horse the day before we were due to leave. Bill Delaney came down to the train to see us off, and I gave him the last chapters and asked him to have them retyped and send the manuscript to Farrar & Rinehart. I wrote Farrar & Rinehart on the train. I told them I would be back in six weeks, that I needed a vacation. I did not see New York again until 1946."
In the midst of the 1950s wave of "weird" comics and competition from a new wave of magazines, such as Galaxy Science Fiction and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, the Weird Tales readership began to fall away. Following the death of Margaret Delaney in 1952, Weird Tales was reduced to a digest-size format (September 1953), and then it closed up shop a few months later (March 1954).
In 1956, Bill Delaney married Regina Cogan. He did not continue in publishing; one of his later business ventures was a Manhattan greeting card shop. After Regina Delaney's death in a 1970 auto accident, he took up residence in the New York Athletic Club. He died March 15 in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, after a long illness, survived by three children, 19 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
Complete runs of the 279 issues of Weird Tales are highly valued by collectors, with complete runs being sold in the 1980s for prices between $20,000 and $25,000. After Weird Tales folded in 1954, the word "weird" surfaced immediately on several short-lived 1955 publications – the British Weird and Occult Library paperback magazine, the British pulp Weird World and True Weird. Edited by Calvin Beck for publisher Joe Weider, True Weird later changed its name to True Strange in order to kill a persistent office joke about True Weider magazine.
All rights to Weird Tales were next acquired by editor-publisher Leo Margulies. It was Margulies who gave Mort Weisinger his first editorial job, earning $15 a week, at Standard (Thrilling Wonder Stories). In the back of the hall during the First World Science Fiction Convention (1939), Margulies and Weisinger concocted the character of Captain Future, with Margulies plotting the magazine on the spot to the convention attendees. The following year the character debuted in both magazine form (Captain Future) and comics (Startling Stories, America's Best). Margulies was also instrumental in Weisinger's switch to DC as Superman editor-writer, advising him that pulps had less of a future than comics. "On the honor roll of great fiction magazines of all time, Weird Tales rates very high," wrote Margulies. "Among devotees of the weird, fantastic, science fiction and off-trail, the magazine was considered a classic." With the backlog of Weird Tales material, Margulies packaged two Pyramid anthologies -- Weird Tales (1964) and Worlds of Weird (1965).
On November 14, 1969, Weird Tales founder Jacob Clark Henneberger died. The legendary magazine Henneberger created reappeared in time for its 50th anniversary when Margulies revived Weird Tales for four pulp-sized issues (1973-74), edited by Sam Moscowitz. After Margulies died in 1975, the WT logo and title rights were acquired by Robert Weinberg, editor of WT50 (1974) and The Weird Tales Story (1977). In the UK, Peter Haining edited two Weird Tales collections for Sphere in 1978.
In 1981, Zebra Books presented WT as a new "paperback magazine" series, four issues edited by Lin Carter. Brian Forbes' Bellerophon Network brought the magazine back for two issues in 1984 and 1985. George H. Scithers revived the title in 1988 for the Terminus Publishing Company with assistant editors Darrell Schweitzer and John Gregory Bettancourt. In 1991, Schweitzer took full editorship, but the license to use the Weird Tales title was revoked with the Spring 1994, and the magazine changed its name to Worlds of Fantasy & Horror. The Weird Tales title was licensed to DNA Publications, the publisher of Absolute Magnitude and Dreams of Decadence, in March 1998.
Robert Bloch, who fashioned almost half a million words for Weird Tales (spread over 70 stories), once wrote: "Throughout the years, working with or for Weird Tales was largely a labor of love for all concerned. The magazine was never a moneymaker; it attracted few advertisers, and its rates of payment to contributors was low, even by Depression standards. Yet, in a strange sort of way, it was probably the Depression of the Thirties which enabled the magazine to continue. Today's publishers and distributors would never bother with such a trivial source of revenue; today's printing houses would hardly continue a magazine which went so consistently into the red on so small a circulation; today's writers couldn't afford to aim their output directly at so non-lucrative an outlet for their work. That Weird Tales managed to survive as long as it did is probably the weirdest tale of all."
By Bhob Stewart
Much like the white stuff in the middle of an Oreo cookie, the magazine Weird Tales lies strangely sandwiched between cartoon magazines and comic books. To probe exactly what this odd statement means, one must pay attention to the men behind the curtain, notably Jacob Clark Henneberger and William J. Delaney, Sr., who kept Weird Tales racked on newsstands over many decades.
The life of Bill Delaney (1892-1986), publisher of Weird Tales, Short Stories and World Astrology, parallels the history of popular fiction during the 20th Century. During the years Delaney published Weird Tales (1938-54), with Farnsworth Wright and Dorothy McIlwraith as his editors, the magazine introduced the highly stylized cover illustrations of Hannes Bok and published the earliest stories of Fritz Leiber and Ray Bradbury. Six of the Bradbury stories published by Delaney later became memorable adaptations in EC Comics, illustrated by Jack Davis, George Evans, Graham Ingels, Jack Kamen and Joe Orlando: "There Was an Old Woman" (Tales from the Crypt 34 from the July 1944 issue of Weird Tales); "The Lake" (Vault of Horror 31 from the May 1944 Weird Tales); "Let's Play Poison" (Vault 29 from Weird Tales, November 1946); "The Handler" (Crypt 36 from Weird Tales, January 1947); "The October Game" (Shock SuspenStories 9 from Weird Tales, March 1948); "The Black Ferris" (Haunt of Fear 18 from Weird Tales, May 1948).
During the early 1950s, when the 279-issue continuous run of Weird Tales was winding down, a glance at a newsstand revealed the magazine's strong influence on comic books. In a 1980 paperback revival of Weird Tales, Lin Carter wrote, "I can think of no other magazine in history which exerted quite the same sort of influence which Weird Tales exerted over the genre it shaped and perfected, and the authors who contributed to it so devotedly over the years... And there can have been very few fiction magazines in the history of publishing which have had as many of their stories dramatized on radio, television and in the movies."In addition to the EC adaptations, the magazine provided a source for other graphic story adaptations, such as Robert Bloch's "The Shambler from the Stars" (Weird Tales, June 1935), illustrated by Jim Starlin and Tom Palmer for Marvel's Journey into Mystery 3 (February 1973). Only occasionally did periodical publishers put the word "weird" into magazine mastheads, yet within the comic book field, Weird Tales spawned a seemingly endless parade of weirdness: Weird (1966), Weird Adventures (1951), Weird Chills (1954), Weird Comics (1940), Weird Fantasy (1950), Weird Horrors (1952), Weird Mysteries (1952), Weird Mystery Tales (1972), Weird Science (1950), Weird Science-Fantasy (1954), Weird Science-Fantasy Annual (1953-54), Weird SuspenStories (the Canadian reprint of Crime SuspenStories), Weird Suspense (1975), Weird Tales of the Future (1952), Weird Tales of the Macabre (1975), Weird Terror (1952), Weird Thrillers (1951), Weird War Tales (1971), Weird Western Tales (1972), Weird Wonder Tales (1973) and Weird Worlds (1970).
"Nightmare World" by Basil Wolverton in Weird Tales of the Future 3 (September 1952).
Pinpointing Delaney's role in all this, one must back-pedal to publications of the 19th Century. With a focus on reprints, translations and classics, Short Stories was launched in 1890. After it was purchased in 1910 by Doubleday, it was converted into a 160-page all-fiction pulp adventure magazine featuring stories by Max Brand, Talbot Mundy, Sax Rohmer, Edgar Wallace and others. Born in Brooklyn two years after the first issue of Short Stories, Delaney served during World War I in France with the United States Marine Corps, returned to New York after the war and entered the advertising field as a salesman. In 1937, Delaney bought Short Stories from Doubleday, and the magazine's base of operations moved to his office at 9 Rockefeller Plaza.
When Delaney acquired Short Stories, he also acquired its editor, Dorothy McIlwraith, who had worked for Doubleday for 20 years. A native of Canada, McIlwraith became one of the higher paid pulp editors while working for Delaney. Leo Margulies, at Standard Magazines, ranked highest with $250 a week, but most pulp editors took home weekly salaries of $50 to $75. Delaney employed McIlwraith at $100 a week.
Frank Gruber, in The Pulp Jungle, described his 1937 encounter with McIlwraith: "I knew that Short Stories was virtually a closed market, but I took the Argosy reject in to Short Stories. I met Dorothy McIlwraith for the first time. She was cool, formal, not too encouraging, as she had a stable of excellent, regular writers. I gave her one of my finest sales pitches, told her I had to have two cents a word, that the editors of Argosy and Adventure were laying siege at my door, but I liked Short Stories so much that I preferred to have my work in it. I later became so well acquainted with Dorothy McIlwraith that we frequently discussed this first meeting of ours. I would guess that Dorothy was 52 or 53 years of age at this time... She was a heavy-set woman who had never married. She lived in a small house on Long Island with another spinster. She was an excellent editor. The day after my all-out sales pitch, Dorothy telephoned me. She agreed with all that I had told her and was buying the story at my price of two cents a word! I promptly wrote a second story for Dorothy, which she also bought for two cents a word. Then I plunged into the novelettes that dominated the magazine for the next several years."
In 1938, Delaney's company, Short Stories Inc., also began to publish Weird Tales from the 9 Rockefeller Plaza office. The magazine had been published previously for 15 years in Indianapolis and Chicago before it was bought by Delaney. The origin of Weird Tales is curiously linked with cartoon humor magazines, including the Fawcett publication, Captain Billy's Whiz-Bang, a title which served as a springboard in 1940 for key Fawcett names and titles -- Captain Marvel, Billy Batson, Whiz Comics and Slam Bang Comics.The founder and original publisher of Weird Tales was Jacob Clark Henneberger. In 1916, Henneberger was a student at a Virginia military academy where he attended English literature classes taught by Captain Stevens. Each semester Stevens gave an hour-long lecture, "Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque," covering various writers influenced by Poe. What Henneberger learned in that class stayed with him as he entered publishing with The Collegiate World. The magazine attracted few advertisers until Henneberger decided to expand "The Area of Good Feelings," a section of excerpts from college humor magazines. When these pages were developed into an entire publication, College Humor was born. In 1920, College Humor sold out its first print run of 50,000 and went back to press for another 15,000.
Henneberger was acquainted with Wilford H. "Captain Billy" Fawcett, who had returned from WWI to Robbinsdale, Minnesota, where he began producing a small mimeographed newsletter of military banter and jokes, circulated among the disabled at the local veterans' hospital in 1920. After distribution by a wholesaler to drugstores and hotel lobbies, the cartoon-joke publication increased its circulation and upgraded to a saddle-stitched, digest-size format. By 1923, it had a circulation of 425,000 with $500,000 annual profits. The title Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, combining Fawcett's name with the nickname of a destructive WWI artillery shell, is immortalized in the lyrics to the song "Trouble" from Meredith Willson's The Music Man (1962): "Is there a nicotine stain on his index finger? A dime novel hidden in the corncrib? Is he starting to memorize jokes from Captain Billy's Whiz Bang?" However, this is an anachronistic reference, since The Music Man is set in River City, Iowa during 1912, which was seven years before the first issue was published. The humor magazine often featured a picture of Wilford Fawcett in uniform along with the caption, "This magazine is edited by a Spanish-American and World War veteran and is dedicated to the Fighting Forces of the United States and Canada." 
In 1922, Wilford Fawcett's brother, Harvey Fawcett, began publishing a similar gag book when he acquired rights to do the American edition of Calgary Eye-Opener in Minneapolis. This was the publication that launched Carl Barks as a cartoonist in 1928, enabling him to leave the railroad gang and go freelance. Calgary Eye-Opener was taken over by contractor Henry Meyer. Barks recalled, "Meyer was enough of a businessman to see things weren't being run right around there. There was too much drinking and playing around, and not enough production. So he looked over the list of gag men and decided that hell, I was a hard-working son-of-a-gun. So he sent a telegram to me, asking if I would come back there. I had enough money to send a telegram saying I didn't have enough money to get back there. He sent me money, and I closed my affairs very rapidly and gave away the big stack of joke magazines I had. What I could carry in a valise, I carried with me. I got into Minneapolis in November of 1931." Banking $110 a month at his new job, Barks and editor Ed Sumner also attempted to launch another humor magazine, Coo-Coo, in 1932, but it only lasted one issue. In 1935, Barks left for Hollywood and his long association with Walt Disney.
Other small-scale periodicals of the early 1920s were Jim Jam Jems, the saucy Smokehouse Monthly and George Julian Houtain's Home Brew. When the monthly sales of Captain Billy's Whiz Bang reached half a million, Henneberger took note of the rising revenue, imitating Whiz-Bang with The Magazine of Fun. "Soon," wrote Henneberger, "there were a number of these small magazines on the stands, and a number of them provided the capital for further venture. One of them, Home Brew, introduced me to Howard Lovecraft." Lovecraft's "Herbert West – Reanimator" appeared in Home Brew in 1922, the year Henneberger first saw the publication.Henneberger also published romance pulps, girlie magazines and Detective Tales. In 1922, Henneberger and J.M. Lassinger started their Rural Publishing Corp. and launched the first issue of Weird Tales, dated March 1923. Edited by the Chicago newspaperman and mystery writer Edwin Baird, the magazine had financial problems during its first year. Baird was replaced by Farnsworth Wright after the first 14 issues. "Farnsworth Wright was the second editor of Weird Tales and the man responsible for its longevity," wrote Henneberger. "He was a rare human being who combined a sense of humor with a knowledge of literature and his fellow man. The previous editor, Edwin Baird, assumed the duties of getting out a companion magazine, Detective Tales, as well as Weird Tales." Under Baird, the magazine published such authors as Lovecraft (who appeared in the October 1923 issue with "Dagon"), Clark Ashton Smith and Seabury Quinn. Today, it is Lovecraft who is most strongly identified with Weird Tales, but it was Quinn who was the magazine's most popular writer, with his series about psychic detective Jules de Grandin.
From Home Brew, Henneberger learned that Lovecraft lived in Brooklyn, and he went to see him. "Meeting Lovecraft in Brooklyn was a rare experience," he wrote to Sam Moskowitz, "despite the fact that he was weighted down with marriage problems. He was married to a beautiful White Russian girl, and it seems his work of reviewing and an occasional editing job did not provide the means to support her as she desired. The union was short lived. I tried in vain to get Lovecraft to come to Chicago, but he was tradition bound to New England, especially Rhode Island in which state I called on him a few months before his death. The first story I bought from Howard was 'The Rats in the Walls,' and I think it was one of his finest. However, I sat down with Howard and Harry Houdini one evening while Houdini recounted an experience in Egypt or rather the Giza plateau. A few weeks later Howard submitted the manuscript 'Imprisoned with the Pharaohs.' It was published at my insistence, although Baird did not like it and Wright was not then at the helm of Weird Tales. During this time I was publishing College Humor and The Magazine of Fun successfully... I never made any money with Weird Tales, but the few headaches it caused were compensated by the association with men like William Sprenger (business manager), Farnsworth Wright, Frank Belknap Long, Seabury Quinn (who ran an undertakers' magazine) and many prominent men like Harry Houdini who swore by the publication."
Subtitled "The Unique Magazine" and "a magazine of the bizarre and the unusual," the "early issues were undistinguished," according to The Science Fiction Encyclopedia. After Baird's first 13 issues, a friend of Henneberger's, the songwriter Otis Adelbert Kline (1891-1946), who had written Weird Tales' first serial ("The Thing of a Thousand Shapes"), served briefly as editor (May-July 1924) on the issue planned as the last. "Problems with the printer," wrote Moskowitz, "more than lack of circulation, plunged the early Weird Tales into debt. In order to pay it off, Henneberger sold his profitable Detective Tales."
When the magazine reappeared (November 1924), it had both a new publisher, Popular Fiction Publishing Company, and a new editor, Farnsworth Wright (1888-1940). Born in San Francisco, the musicologist Wright had published an amateur magazine in high school, lived through the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fought in the infantry during WWI before joining Baird as an editorial assistant, beginning with Weird Tales' first issue. For the next 16 years, Wright, who suffered from Parkinson's disease, guided Weird Tales through its peak years, although even at its peak, Weird Tales had no more than 50,000 or so readers.
Between 1930 and 1934 Wright also edited Weird Tales' companion magazine, Oriental Stories (retitled Magic Carpet in January 1933), and his love of Shakespeare prompted an edition of A Midsummer Night's Dream with art by the Weird Tales illustrator Virgil Finlay. Other Weird Tales illustrators of the 1930s included Margaret Brundage, J. Allen St. John, Frank Utpatel, Vincent Napoli (who drew for DS Comics in the late 1940s) and Harold De Lay (artist on 1940-47 comics for Novelty and other companies). Working with pastel chalks, Brundage created a series of controversial, erotic covers.
Wright discovered and nurtured a lengthy list of Weird Tales writers – the poet Leah Bodine Drake, the teenage Tennessee Williams, film producer Val Lewton (Cat People), Henry Kuttner, Robert Bloch, August Derleth, Nictzin Dyalhis, Robert E. Howard, Edmond Hamilton (who scripted for DC Comics from 1945 to 1966), Manly Wade Wellman (who scripted for at least eight comics publishers between 1939 and 1951), Catherine L. Moore, Carl Jacobi, Frank Belknap Long, E. Hoffman Price, H. Warner Munn and Donald Wandrei, while also attracting such authors as Gaston Leroux (Phantom of the Opera), Gustave Meyrink (The Golem), Jack Williamson, Murray Leinster, E.F. Benson, A. Merritt and Algernon Blackwood. Weird Tales first published Robert E. Howard in 1925, and his Conan stories began in WT with "The Phoenix on the Sword" (1932). The 1960s revival of interest in Conan and other Howard characters led to numerous Howard-inspired Marvel Comics.
When Delaney purchased Weird Tales in 1938, he followed the same procedure as he had with McIlwraith and Short Stories, and Wright relocated in New York to continue as the Weird Tales editor. The following summer, the 25-year-old Ray Bradbury showed Wright work by Hannes Bok, cover artist of Bradbury's fanzine, Futuria Fantasia (1939-40). "Long before my appearance in Weird Tales," wrote Bradbury, "I had influenced its artistic makeup. In June 1939, I had traveled across the United States on a Greyhound bus, bringing with me a dozen or so Hannes Bok drawings and paintings. I visited Farnsworth Wright in his offices, and he immediately commissioned Bok to paint a cover for Weird. I returned home on the bus in triumph, delighted that I had brought Bok and my favorite magazine together." The painting illustrated David H. Keller's "Lords of the Ice" (December 1939), and other distinctive Bok covers fronted Weird Tales until 1942. During the 1930s and 1940s, pulp magazine illustrators were usually paid between $50 to $75 for a cover painting.
The issue introducing Bok was one of Wright's last; he died in Jackson Heights, Queens, in June 1940. Delaney chose McIlwraith as Wright's successor, and she continued as Weird Tales' editor for the next 14 years. Bloch had praise for McIlwraith's editorial abilities: "I met Dorothy McIlwraith only once, in late 1939. She seemed pleasant, but I recall little about her, and her letters of acceptance, together with those of associate Lamont Buchanan, don't linger in my memory. Actually, I think she's far too neglected. I can't dismiss anyone who published Bradbury, Sturgeon, Brown and other top talents. I think that she would have published more, had she been given the budget to compete with Unknown Worlds, F&SF and other comparable markets. But that lousy one cent a word – and sometimes bimonthly publication – induced few writers to remain in Weird Tales once better rates were obtainable elsewhere. I lasted longer than most, because I was always a bit stupid. (Still am, writing short stories today when I should be knocking out TV episodes at roughly 100 times the fee, plus an additional 100 times for reruns over the years.) But Weird Tales was my first market, my favorite reading as a young fan, and I felt, and feel, that I owed it a lot."
Delaney and McIlwraith continued to fill the pages of Weird Tales with Derleth, Bloch, Wellman, Hamilton and Quinn, while also introducing Leiber, Bradbury, the now-neglected female fantasist Alison V. Harding, Joseph Payne Brennan and others. In addition to Bok, other illustrators for the Delaney/McIlwraith issues included Lee Brown Coye, Matt Fox (who also illustrated for 1952-63 Marvel Comics and 1967-69 issues of Castle of Frankenstein), Charles A. Kennedy, Boris Dolgov, Fred Humiston, Harold Rayner, Henry del Campo, A.R. Tilburne, John Giunta (who illustrated many comic books from 1938 on), Bill Wayne, Jon Arfstrom and Joseph Krucher.
Frank Gruber (1904-1969), who knocked out some 800,000 words for pulps in 1940, worked just as hard in 1941, but still found time to drop by for weekly chats with McIlwraith and Delaney, as he detailed in The Pulp Jungle: "I don't think I missed an issue of Short Stories that year. If I did not have a serial running in the magazine, I had a long novelette. Bill Delaney, the owner of Short Stories, had become one of my best friends... On Mondays I always went into town... I made a call or two, then about eleven o'clock I would go to the offices of Short Stories. Bill Delaney and I talked awhile, or played a rubber or two of gin rummy, had lunch and returned and played some more gin rummy. About four or four thirty I went home."
When Gruber went home it was to Scarsdale, but in January 1942 he moved to Manhasset, Long Island, where Bill Delaney lived with his wife Margaret (whom he had married in 1923). The Delaney/Gruber friendship was interrupted when Gruber swung a Hollywood deal only weeks after moving to Manhasset. Delaney helped him make his exit. "We decided to close up the house, leave everything in it and take the train to Hollywood, carrying only our suitcases –- and Bob, who was then 22 months of age. I completed The Gift Horse the day before we were due to leave. Bill Delaney came down to the train to see us off, and I gave him the last chapters and asked him to have them retyped and send the manuscript to Farrar & Rinehart. I wrote Farrar & Rinehart on the train. I told them I would be back in six weeks, that I needed a vacation. I did not see New York again until 1946."
In the midst of the 1950s wave of "weird" comics and competition from a new wave of magazines, such as Galaxy Science Fiction and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, the Weird Tales readership began to fall away. Following the death of Margaret Delaney in 1952, Weird Tales was reduced to a digest-size format (September 1953), and then it closed up shop a few months later (March 1954).
In 1956, Bill Delaney married Regina Cogan. He did not continue in publishing; one of his later business ventures was a Manhattan greeting card shop. After Regina Delaney's death in a 1970 auto accident, he took up residence in the New York Athletic Club. He died March 15 in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, after a long illness, survived by three children, 19 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
Complete runs of the 279 issues of Weird Tales are highly valued by collectors, with complete runs being sold in the 1980s for prices between $20,000 and $25,000. After Weird Tales folded in 1954, the word "weird" surfaced immediately on several short-lived 1955 publications – the British Weird and Occult Library paperback magazine, the British pulp Weird World and True Weird. Edited by Calvin Beck for publisher Joe Weider, True Weird later changed its name to True Strange in order to kill a persistent office joke about True Weider magazine.
All rights to Weird Tales were next acquired by editor-publisher Leo Margulies. It was Margulies who gave Mort Weisinger his first editorial job, earning $15 a week, at Standard (Thrilling Wonder Stories). In the back of the hall during the First World Science Fiction Convention (1939), Margulies and Weisinger concocted the character of Captain Future, with Margulies plotting the magazine on the spot to the convention attendees. The following year the character debuted in both magazine form (Captain Future) and comics (Startling Stories, America's Best). Margulies was also instrumental in Weisinger's switch to DC as Superman editor-writer, advising him that pulps had less of a future than comics. "On the honor roll of great fiction magazines of all time, Weird Tales rates very high," wrote Margulies. "Among devotees of the weird, fantastic, science fiction and off-trail, the magazine was considered a classic." With the backlog of Weird Tales material, Margulies packaged two Pyramid anthologies -- Weird Tales (1964) and Worlds of Weird (1965).
On November 14, 1969, Weird Tales founder Jacob Clark Henneberger died. The legendary magazine Henneberger created reappeared in time for its 50th anniversary when Margulies revived Weird Tales for four pulp-sized issues (1973-74), edited by Sam Moscowitz. After Margulies died in 1975, the WT logo and title rights were acquired by Robert Weinberg, editor of WT50 (1974) and The Weird Tales Story (1977). In the UK, Peter Haining edited two Weird Tales collections for Sphere in 1978.
In 1981, Zebra Books presented WT as a new "paperback magazine" series, four issues edited by Lin Carter. Brian Forbes' Bellerophon Network brought the magazine back for two issues in 1984 and 1985. George H. Scithers revived the title in 1988 for the Terminus Publishing Company with assistant editors Darrell Schweitzer and John Gregory Bettancourt. In 1991, Schweitzer took full editorship, but the license to use the Weird Tales title was revoked with the Spring 1994, and the magazine changed its name to Worlds of Fantasy & Horror. The Weird Tales title was licensed to DNA Publications, the publisher of Absolute Magnitude and Dreams of Decadence, in March 1998.
Robert Bloch, who fashioned almost half a million words for Weird Tales (spread over 70 stories), once wrote: "Throughout the years, working with or for Weird Tales was largely a labor of love for all concerned. The magazine was never a moneymaker; it attracted few advertisers, and its rates of payment to contributors was low, even by Depression standards. Yet, in a strange sort of way, it was probably the Depression of the Thirties which enabled the magazine to continue. Today's publishers and distributors would never bother with such a trivial source of revenue; today's printing houses would hardly continue a magazine which went so consistently into the red on so small a circulation; today's writers couldn't afford to aim their output directly at so non-lucrative an outlet for their work. That Weird Tales managed to survive as long as it did is probably the weirdest tale of all."
Labels: bill delaney, bok, bradbury, carl barks, fawcett, george evans, gruber, henneberger, kamen, margulies, matt fox, mcilwraith ingels, orlando, robert bloch, weird tales, wolverton
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