Showing posts with label Weird Tales. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Weird Tales. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 1, 2023

The Weird Tales Centenary

The debut issue, March 1923, of the magazine Weird Tales, came out one hundred years ago. In its main run, it would last until 1954, and comprise some 279 issues. Many later-to-be-famous authors appeared in those 279 issues. Here I'd like to showcase only the first issue itself.  I post the contents listing from the FictionMags Index (here):

In terms of posterity, it's not an especially promising line-up. Farnsworth Wright was not yet the editor, though he contributed a short vignette. After a rocky start, Weird Tales did find its way to become a magazine worth celebrating.

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Saturday, January 9, 2021

Modern Ghosts, 1890-style

In 1890 Harper & Brothers of New York published a collection of seven stories entitled Modern Ghosts.  It includes an introduction by George William Curtis, and it was later reissued as volume 15 in the series of “The Continental Classics”—itself a very confusing series bibliographically. The copyright dates in the Continental Classics series range from around 1887 through (at least) 1915, but just when the series itself began to be packaged as such I have not been able to determine.  Under the copyright notice of 1890 in Modern Ghosts, there is a printing code of “M—R” in all the copies I have seen.  Translating this code into month and year, per Harper & Brothers usual practice, gives December 1917, so it is possible that the Continental Classics edition of Modern Ghosts came out at that time. Certainly the standard red cloth binding on it has a feel of the 1910s and not of the 1890s—the original 1890 edition of Modern  Ghosts was in elegant blue cloth with silver stamping.

The 1890 cover
But what about the contents?  It’s a pretty good collection, with a few classics by Maupassant (“The Horla “ and “On the River”—both translated from the French by Jonathan Sturges), as well as Gustavo Adolfo Becquer’s “Maese Pérez, the Organist” (translated from the Spanish by Rollo Ogden).  The other four tales are by lesser-known names, “Siesta” by Alexander L. Kielland (translated from the German by Charles Flint McClumpha); “The Tall Woman” by Pedro Antonio de Alarcón (translated from the Spanish by Rollo Ogden); “Fioraccio” by Giovanni Magherini-Graziani (translated from the Italian by Mary A. Craig); and “The Silent Woman” by Leopold Kompert (translated form the German by Charles Flint McClumpha). “The Horla” is probably the only true classic, and it is the best story in the book.  But most of the others have some good moments, even if, as in a few, the narration meanders and takes its time before coming to what might be the supernatural. The translators names are given only in the table of contents, and little is otherwise said about the authors.

George William Curtis (1824-1892) was well-known in his day, a modern-thinking figure (a vocal abolitionist and supporter of women’s suffrage) who must have seemed an apt choice to introduce a book of non-traditional ghost stories.  Curtis’s introduction is mostly about the attraction of eerie stories, but he does come around at the end to mention some of the contents of the volume he is introducing:  “It is the most modern and contemporary contribution to the literature of ghosts, selected from authors in various parts of Europe—Norway, France, Spain, Austria, Italy—all of them masters in their way, and that sympathetic and delicate lightness of touch which is indispensable to the happiest treatment of such themes” (xii-xiv).  He concludes:

These little tales, like instant photographs, bring us nearer to the life of other lands, and apprise us that, in an unexpected sense, we are all of one blood—a blood which is chilled by an influence that we cannot comprehend, and at a contact of which we are conscious by an apprehension beyond that of the senses.

The book Modern Ghosts had one fan in Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright. In the column of “Weird Story Reprints” which Wright ran in the magazine from July 1925 through January 1940, Wright reprinted (between 1926 and 1934) six of the seven stories found in this book. The only story Wright didn’t reprint is the final one, “The Silent Woman” by Leopold Kompert, which doesn’t really qualify as either a ghost or a supernatural story, but is rather one touching on Jewish legendry. So one can see why Wright did not select it for reprinting, though I note that it was reprinted in the anonymously-edited Best Ghost Stories (1919), published by Boni & Liveright in their nascent Modern Library series (later to be taken over by Random House). (The introduction by Arthur B. Reeve credits the selections to J[oseph] L[ewis] French,  who may have wished to remain anonymous to avoid direct competition with his by-lined anthology Great Ghost Stories published the previous year.)  

Modern Ghosts anticipates the work of Robert Aickman by more than half a century. 

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Sunday, March 8, 2020

A plagiarism in early Weird Tales

In the March 1925 issue of Weird Tales, which Farnsworth Wright had been editing since the November 1924 issue, there appeared a short three-page story entitled "The House of Fear" bylined as by "Albert Seymour Graham."  Within a few weeks Wright had discovered that the story was a plagiarism, and the same "author" had submitted to him as original work three further plagiarisms, of an early H.G. Wells story, of Fitz-James O'Brien's "What Was It?", and of a section of Sax Rohmer's The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu.  None of the further stories were published, and the name of "Albert Seymour Graham" appears only one other time in a pulp magazine, closely contemporary to the Weird Tales appearance, in a list  of correct respondents to a cypher contest in Flynn's for 17 January 1925.  There Albert Seymour Graham is noted as being from Chicago, Illinois.

The name is unusual enough that I can find in genealogical sources only one Albert Seymour Graham, a young African-American boy who was aged 15 in 1925.  He was born in Manhattan on 10 November 1909, the younger son of Albert M. Graham (born around 1876 in Virginia) and Carrie E. Seymour (born around 1881 in Connecticut).  The older son, Charles, was three years older than his brother. Between the 1910 and 1920 Censuses, the family moved to Chicago, where the father's profession is given in 1920 as "usher, railway station" and in 1930 as "porter, railroad car."  In 1930, the two sons were employed as follows:  Charles, age 23, "mail clerk, railroad company" and Albert, age 20, "elevator operator." In his 1940 registration for the draft for W.W. II, Albert was living in Chicago (5' 4" and weighing 140 pounds), and his wife's name is given as "Eula Handson Graham." A later wife was named "Alma Bernice Strong." Albert Seymour Graham died in Chicago on 15 May 1994. 

And what of his plagiarized short story?  It has some touches of Poe but otherwise (like Farnworth Wright) I don't recognize any direct source. Does anyone?  I have scans of all three pages below (click on the scans to make them larger).




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Sunday, September 16, 2018

Essential New Book on Weird Tales Magazine

front cover
There is a new book, out this summer, that takes pride of place on the small bookshelf of essential scholarship on the famous Weird Tales magazine. This is John Locke's The Thing's Incredible: The Secret Origins of Weird Tales (Off-Trail Publications, hardcover and trade paperback).  It clocks in at around 300 pages, and surprisingly, the coverage centers on the first two years of the magazine's existence.  It discusses thoroughly the first owners, including J.C. Henneberger, and the first editors, including Edwin Baird, Otis Adelbert Kline (editor for one issue), and Farnsworth Wright, who ran the magazine from 1924 through 1939.  The story of how H.P. Lovecraft nearly became the editor is told here in more detail than anywhere else.  Many authors who contributed to Weird Tales are also discussed, ranging from C.M. Eddy, Jr., to Arthur Burks, and even Houdini's involvement with the magazine is detailed.

The appendices reproduce some good rare stuff too, including a 1923 article by Edwin Baird titled "What Editors Want" and a story and a poem by Farnsworth Wright.  The poem is called "Self-Portrait" and it begins:

"The editor's a gloomy guy, who fusses, fumes and frets;
He puts in all his cheerless life expressing his regrets.
And you should see the things he sees when perched upon his Eyrie;
The shuddering shapes and eldritch forms, and dim things out of Faerie. . ."

("Self-Portrait" originally appeared in Fantasy Magazine for April 1935.)

Order via Amazon.com with these links:  $35 hardcover,  or $24 trade paperback.

Order via Amazon.co.uk with these links:  £27.09 hardcover, or
£18.42 trade paperback.

rear cover


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Tuesday, December 10, 2013

Henry S. Whitehead News

First, I'll present here my "Late Review" (one from the current issue, no. 21, of Wormwood) of Whitehead's one novel, published the year before his death. I do so primarily to share the incredibly horrid and unappealling dust-wrapper of the book, reproduced below at right.



Whitehead, Henry S. Pinkie at Camp Cherokee (New York:  G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1931)

Henry S. Whitehead (1882-1932) is remembered primarily for his short stories, many of which were originally published in Weird Tales magazine in the 1920s and early 1930s and collected posthumously in two volumes published by Arkham House, Jumbee and Other Uncanny Tales (1944) and West India Lights (1946).  Less known is the fact that Whitehead published two books during his lifetime, the first being a work of populist theology, The Garden of the Lord (1922), the second being a novel for boys, Pinkie at Camp Cherokee. 
            In the 1920s, Whitehead was involved with a number of summer camps for boys, and he was one of the owners of Camp Cherokee on Long Island, so in one sense his novel can be viewed as a kind of advertisement for the camp. Whitehead’s first story for boys, “Baseball and Pelicans,” had been submitted to Clayton H. Ernst, editor of The Open Road for Boys, and it was published in the June 1926 issue.  Ernst told Whitehead that he should write a book around the tale, and Whitehead took up this advice during the winter of 1929-30 while he was ill. The two main episodes in Whitehead’s short story were expanded into a novel titled Pinkie—Superguy.  The title was sensibly changed by the publisher to Pinkie at Camp Cherokee. It centers around a young red-haired boy from Barbados named James Roderick Evelyn Maurice Kelley-Clutton, who is nicknamed Pinkie because his skin turns pink rather than tan when exposed to the sun. The story is told by a regular boy Bill Spofford from Pencilville, Ohio. Pinkie, with his British accent and complete lack of knowledge of regular American traditions, serves as the proverbial fish out-of-water, and an object of ridicule for most of the boys at the camp, until they come to realize that not only is he talented—his running abilities win a competition, and his unorthodox batting, cricket-style, wins a baseball game—but worthy of their respect and friendship.  Of course rivalries between campers and other nearby camps are presented in a simplistic us/good versus them/bad mentality, and the chumminess between the friendly boys is often cloying and sentimentalized. The attitudes are dated, and the whole book would be a dire read save for two stories inserted as tales told to groups of boys. In one (pages 83-90), Pinkie tells a story around a campfire of a West Indies negro superstition about acquiring luck from a Dead Man’s Tooth. In the second (page 148-158), the camp Chief tells the weird life-story of a thin match.  Remarkably, this tale appeared in a slightly different and longer form as “The Thin Match” in the March 1925 issue of Weird Tales. These two inserted tales account for the only value of this book to the modern reader.  


I'd also like to call attention here to an article by David Goudsward coming out later this month in The Weird Fiction Review, no. 4, from Centipede Press. Goudsward's article is called  "Halsey and the Padré: A 14-year-old’s perspective on H. S. Whitehead".  The article shows a side of Whitehead's personality not usually explored, that of his role at a boys' summer camp.

And another piece of Whitehead lore includes the following photograph, originally published in The New York Times, for Sunday, January 26th 1930.  Upon seeing it Whitehead was inspired to write a letter to twelve-year-old Teddy Gants, the second figure from the left. 

The letter, sent from Dunedin, Florida, reads:

Dear Mr. Teddy Gants,

I noticed your picture in the N.Y. Times of Sunday, January 26th, and as I looked at it I said to myself: "There's exactly the kind of boy I want in my camp!"

So it occurred to me to drop you a line and ask if you go to camp summers, or if, perhaps, you might be interested in Pine Bluff Camp at Port Jefferson, Long Island. Pine Bluff is a mighty fine camp, with more than 100 boys, and a good place for an athlete. I've always been one, all my life, and was three years a Metropolitan District (N.Y.) Sr. Champion All-Around athlete.

Maybe if you, or your father or mother, are interested in your going to camp, you might drop me a line, and I can have the catalogue sent to you, etc. Or, if you will let me know your home address I can come in and talk it over when I come north.  It won't be very long now.

We have everything at Pine Bluff from handball up and down!

Best wishes,
Very sincerely yours,

Henry S. Whitehead

Teddy Gants, a twelve-year-old girl, noted of the letter, "Say, I wonder what kind of person that man thinks I am."  But that question should really be directed toward the letter-writer. 





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