Black Gate

The first issue of Weird Tales landed on newsstands in late February of 1923. 192 pages long, it measured about 6 inches by 9, a standard size for a pulp fiction magazine. There were two different versions of the cover, perhaps due to a printing error; the illustration’s the same, a man with knife and gun fighting a shadowy tentacled monster which has grabbed a nearby young lady, but the colouring’s different. Either way, the cover advertised “‘OOZE’ / An Extraordinary / Novelette / by Anthony M. Rud / The Tale of A / Thousand Thrills.” Perhaps most intriguing, though, was the subhead below the logo: “The Unique Magazine.”

Thanks to modern technology it’s possible for anyone with an internet connection to flip through issue 1 of Weird Tales, if in a virtual format. In a later post I’ll write about the fiction the issue holds, but today I want to consider the magazine as an object (to the extent that’s possible working from a PDF). What do we see as we page through it? What signs of its times stand out? And what can be deduced about the editorial team’s vision?

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A bit more than 103 years ago, the first issue of Weird Tales reached newsstands across North America. The magazine would be published consistently for over three decades, with the title revived sporadically ever since. The original Weird Tales would become a significant influence on the development of the fantasy and horror genres, and would lend its name to a subgenre of fantasy and a certain tone in fiction: the weird tale.

That entire first run of Weird Tales, ‘the unique magazine,’ is available at the Internet Archive. I thought it’d be an interesting project to look at it issue by issue, reading the magazine as it was published and discussing each issue as a whole. It was the venue for much of the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard, as well as a home for work by Robert Bloch, C.L. Moore, and Ray Bradbury, among many others. I wondered what it would be like to read those stories in the context of the other tales in the magazine by lesser-known writers; and to consider each issue as a package, a collection, with its cover and editorials and letters. And its ads; to look at the magazine holistically is to consider the many irruptions of its era into the experience of the fiction.

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