Strange Rays & Weird Waves in Weird Tales

Weird Tales was a different kind of magazine when it came back in November 1924 than during its first year-and-a-third in print. There was a new look and a different format. Although some of the previous authors had returned, the cover artist, Andrew Brosnatch, was new. And of course there was a new editor in Farnsworth Wright. Weird fiction wasn't fully developed in the early days of "The Unique Magazine." You could say that the development of weird fiction as a genre actually happened in its pages from 1923 onward. Nevertheless, the stories published in Weird Tales between March 1923 and May/June/July 1924 tended to be weird-fictional. Things changed a little when Wright came on.

Farnsworth Wright contributed to Weird Tales in its first incarnation. His first story, "The Closing Hand" (Mar. 1923), is pretty conventional. His second to last, "An Adventure in the Fourth Dimension" (Oct. 1923), is far less so, for it treats the concept of a fourth dimension and touches on Einsteinian or relativistic physics. It's clear that Wright had an interest in stories of that type, which were called at the time pseudo-scientific stories or scientific romances. When he became editor, he set out to publish more in the pages of Weird Tales.

As I have been going through the issues published in 1925, I have noticed a recurring word: rays. I figured I had better make a search for that word and related words and concepts. Radio was big and new in the 1920s. Radium and radioactivity were in the news and in our culture, too. (Radium was discovered in 1898, X-rays in 1896.) We think of "Radium Girls" as a name for the young women of the 1920s who painted glow-in-the-dark watch dials and fell ill--and died--as a result. But in the early twentieth century, "Radium Girls" were performers on stage, their bodies literally highlighted by phosphorescent paint. Phosphorescence isn't the same as radioactivity. I can't say that Radium Girls on stage or in ballrooms were painted with radium-paint (despite the newspaper article shown below). Radium silk, of the same vintage, was not radioactive at all. But there seems to have been a fad for radium and a wider craze for radio. Maybe that's where all of the strange rays and weird waves in Weird Tales came from.

I can't say that this is a comprehensive list, but here are some ray and wave stories in Weird Tales from 1924 to 1926: 

• "The Purple Light" by Ralph Parker Anderson (Nov. 1924) 

• "Radio V-Rays" by Jan Dirk (Mar. 1925) 

• "The Electronic Plague" by Edward Hades (Apr. 1925) 

• "Under the N-Ray" by Will Smith & R.J. Robbins (May 1925)--Cover story. 

• "The Ether Ray" by H.L. Maxson (Sept. 1925) 

• "Red Ether" by Pettersen Marzoni (two-part serial, Feb.-Mar. 1926)--Cover story.

• "The Devil Ray" by Joel Martin Nichols, Jr. (May 1925)--The title doesn't refer to a type of fish but to a devastating form of radioactivity.

• "Queen of the Vortex" by F. Williams Sarles (May 1926)--This story had a sequel in "The Foe from Beyond" (Dec. 1926).

Stories of vortices lead into another category of proto-science fiction, one related to multiple dimensions of space and what we would call space warps. But that's a topic for another time.

 

Weird Tales, May 1925, with a cover story, "Under the N-Ray," by Will Smith and R.J. Robbins and cover art by Andrew Brosnatch. There aren't any rays shown here, but there are waves.

 

Weird Tales, February 1926. The cover story was "Red Ether" by Pettersen Marzoni. The cover artist was C. Barker Petrie, Jr. Here again, there aren't any rays and the only waves are in the distance. Maybe artists of the 1920s had trouble depicting rays, waves, and radioactivity.

 

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

 

And because I have messed up the formatting of this article and can't figure out how to fix it, a picture after the copyright notice: 

 

"Will Dance in a Glow of Radium," from the San Francisco Examiner, May 25, 1905, page 4. "Radium Girls" were in burlesque and vaudeville shows in America and Great Britain from 1904 into the 1920s. By 1930, "Radium Girls" were the young women poisoned by their use in industry of radium-paint. If there was a fad for radium, maybe it reached its end with the well-publicized lawsuit filed by and the deaths of the "Radium Girls" in the late 1920s and early 1930s. This illustration shows two "Radium Girls" in the original sense of the phrase. (The Margaret Hamilton shown here was not the same actress who played the Wicked Witch.) It also hints at "Radium Girls" in the second sense, showing as it does a young woman with a paint brush. By the way, there was revue called "The Radium Girl" performed in Britain in the early 1900s. The girl of the title is dosed with radium by the villain Zigani and "she becomes a girl fond of a butterfly existence." (Source: "The Hippodrome Visit from 'The Radium Girl'," in The Derby Daily Telegraph, May 2, 1916, page 2.)

 

Two Poems About Two Crows

Francis Hard, aka Farnsworth Wright, had a poem called "Two Crows" in the January 1925 issue of Weird Tales. Just six years earlier, Wright had been a soldier stationed in France. In composing his poem, he must have drawn on memories of the Great War:

Two Crows
By Francis Hard (Weird Tales, Jan. 1925)

Two crows flapped over dismally
(So wearily, so drearily)
To the blackened limb of a blasted tree;
The shells flew screaming overhead,
And the field was covered thick with dead--
The earth reeked with its dead.

One crow lamented to his mate
(So wearily, so drearily):
"How long, how long must we now wait
For the taste of food that was so good
Before the shrapnel shattered the wood
And loaded the ground with dead?

"The odor sweet of dying men"
(Lamented he so drearily),
"How strangely pleasant was it when
I sensed it first with ravished breath!
But I am sated, and sick to death,
And would fain lie yon with the dead."

A shell came moaning through the air
(So drearily, so eerily)
And burst where the crows were plaining there;
It shivered the wreck of the blasted tree,
And bits of crow fell bloodily
Among the tangled dead.

* * *

A year and a month later, in February 1926, in his capacity as editor, Wright placed a traditional ballad called "The Twa Corbies" ("The Two Crows") in Weird Tales:

The Twa Corbies
(Old Ballad)
[By Anonymous]

As I was walking all alane,
I heard twa corbies making a mane.
The tane unto the tother say:
Where sail we gang and dine today?

In behint yon auld fail dike
I wot there lies a new-slain knight.
Naebody kens that he lies there
But his hawk, his hound, and his lady fair.

His hound is to the hunting gone,
His hawk to fetch the wild-fowl hame,
His lady's ta'en another mate,
So we may mak our dinner sweet.

I'll sit on his white hause-bane,
Ye'll pick out his bonny blue een,
Wi' ae lock o' his gowden hair
We’ll theek our nest when it grows bare.

Mony a one for him makes mane,
But nane sail ken where he is gane.
O'er his white banes, when they are bare,
The wind sall blaw for evermair.

* * *

"The Twa Corbies" was first in print in 1812. A century later, it was reprinted in Ballads Weird and Wonderful (1912), illustrated by Vernon Hill (1887-1972). It seems to me that Farnsworth Wright had read "The Twa Corbies" and was inspired by it in writing his own poem. The refrain, the repeated "wearily," "drearily," and "eerily," would seem to have been inspired by "The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe and its own refrain of "evermore" and "nevermore," also from its opening line:

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,

I wrote about "The Twa Corbies" on December 19, 2022. You can read what I wrote by clicking here.

Two corvids on the cover of Weird Tales:

Weird Tales, July 1945, cover art by Lee Brown Coye.

Weird Tales, September 1939, cover art by Virgil Finlay.

And what might be a crow but looks more like a myna:

Weird Tales, January 1946, cover art by Albert Roanoke Tilburne.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Francis Hard (1888-1940)

Pseudonym of Farnsworth Wright
Author, Editor, Poet, Journalist, Translator, Soldier
Born July 29, 1888, Santa Barbara, California
Died June 12, 1940, Manhattan, New York, New York

Francis Hard was Farnsworth Wright. He used that pseudonym while writing stories and poems for magazines of which he was the editor. You could call it a conflict of interest for an editor to place his own works in a publication that he edits. I don't see it that way. An editor should have someone else look at his story or poem before putting it into print. He should also accept "No" or "It needs work" in response. But I think it's okay for an editor to publish his own work, even under his own name. Farnsworth Wright wrote as Francis Hard anyway.

Farnsworth Wright was born on July 29, 1888, in Santa Barbara, California, to George Francis Wright (1848-1892), a civil engineer and a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, and Genevieve Hard Wright (1850-1914), a soprano singer and music teacher and an instructor in physical culture. And so already we have an origin for Wright's nom de plume, Francis Hard.

According to his World War I draft card, Farnsworth Wright attended the University of Nevada, where he began his military service. Wright also studied journalism at the University of Washington. (See his yearbook picture below.) His father had served before him in the U.S. Navy. They were descended from Samuel Farnsworth of Groton, Massachusetts, a drummer in Captain Joseph Moor's Company, Colonel William Prescott's Regiment of Massachusetts Militia during the Revolutionary War. Samuel Farnsworth enlisted on May 15, 1775, or less than a month after the war had commenced at Lexington and Concord. He was presumably at the Battle of Bunker Hill less than a month later. On November 9, 1910, the Colorado Society of the Sons of the American Revolution approved Farnsworth Wright's application for membership. Less than eight years later, on September 9, 1918, Private Farnsworth Wright of Company H, 342nd Infantry Regiment, 86th Infantry Division--the Blackhawk Division--shipped out from New York to France aboard the Minnekahda, continuing the Farnsworth and Wright families' records of service to their country.

Wright returned to the United States on August 4, 1919. He had been promoted by then to sergeant. During and after the Great War, Wright had served as a translator in France and I believe in occupied Germany. Before, based in Chicago, he had worked as a newspaper reporter for Musical America Company of New York. He was also, oddly enough, an Esperantist. Music, languages, and culture seem to have come naturally to members of the Wright family.

Farnsworth Wright returned stateside in the same year that Jacob C. Henneberger, late of the U.S. Navy, arrived in Indianapolis. Henneberger also had connections in Chicago. In 1922 (or thereabouts), he formed The Rural Publishing Corporation with a former college classmate, John M. Lansinger. In one way or another, Farnsworth Wright met Henneberger and Lansinger. Wright had a short story, "The Closing Hand," in the first issue of their new magazine, Weird Tales, in March 1923. He had other submissions after that and began working as a reader of manuscripts at some point. Weird Tales and the business behind it foundered in mid-1924. When it came back in November of that year, Farnsworth Wright was full editor. It was then that he began using the name Francis Hard. As Hard, he had five poems and a short story in Weird Tales, plus one story each in it companion titles Oriental Stories and The Magic Carpet Magazine, which were really the same magazine with successively different titles.

Francis Hard's career as an author and a poet lasted almost as long as Farnsworth Wright's did as editor. Wright remained in his post until 1940, the year in which he died at age fifty-one. He was buried at Willamette National Cemetery in Oregon. His widow, Marjorie Jeanette Zinkie Wright (1893-1974), joined him there the year after her death.

Francis Hard's Stories & Poems in Weird Tales, Oriental Stories, and The Magic Carpet Magazine
(All were in Weird Tales unless otherwise noted.)
"The Great Panjandrum" (short story; Nov. 1924)
"Two Crows" (poem; Jan. 1925)
"The Dark Pool" (poem; Apr. 1925)
"The Death Angel" (poem; Sept. 1925)
"The Evening Star" (poem; Mar. 1926)
"The White Queen" in Oriental Stories (short story; Nov. 1930)
"The Picture of Judas" in The Magic Carpet Magazine (short story; Apr. 1933)
"After Two Nights of the Ear-Ache" (poem; Oct. 1937)

Above, the University of Washington yearbook pictures of Farnsworth Wright (1888-1940) and his future wife, Marjorie Zinkie (1893-1974), from the 1913-1914 school year. Marjorie Zinkie studied to be a librarian and worked in that capacity in Idaho, Michigan, and Washington State. Together the Wrights had a son, Robert Farnsworth Wright (1930-1993). He and his wife, Ruthora Marie McBride Wright (1930-1993), died within five months of each other in 1993. I can't say whether Farnsworth and Marjorie Wright have any living descendants.

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales: The Fourth Anniversary

If you're on the hunt for observances of anniversaries in Weird Tales, the place to look is in "The Eyrie," the regular letters column and the place in print where the editor communicated with readers, as well as with authors, who were frequent writers to the magazine. If you look only in the March issues, you might miss something. A better place might be in the May issues of every year, for it was in the May issue that readers had their first chance to comment on the issue from two months before. The editor could then join in and make his own comments.

I have looked in Weird Tales in the March and May issues of 1925 and 1926 and haven't found any mention of anniversaries. "The Eyrie" in the May 1927 issue opens with these words, though: "WEIRD TALES is now four years old." The editorial continues:

When it first appeared on the news stands, many thought it was "just another magazine," but it was soon discovered that WEIRD TALES was a "different" magazine, with a wholesome disregard for the self-imposed editorial limitations of other publications. The fantastic monsters of ancient legend stalked through its pages; werewolves lived again; ghosts and apparitions took on modem trappings; specters wailed in haunted houses; and scientists performed weird experiments in their laboratories. Magazine pages were again opened to the rich literature of the bizarre and fantastic, and with the return of weird fiction to the news stands came the new literature, of which WEIRD TALES is the foremost exponent--the weird-scientific story. The forward leap that science has taken in the last fifty years has stimulated the imaginations of authors, and in the pages of WEIRD TALES the future of the world is rolled back, the void of Space is peopled with flying ships, which can go backward and forward in Time as well as Space; mad scientists strive to destroy the world; tremendous dooms rush in upon the Earth from the sky.

The amazing success of WEIRD TALES has been built upon three types of stories--the weird tale proper; the bizarre and fantastic story; and the weird-scientific story. That these types of stories, which take one away from the humdrum environment of everyday life, are appreciated by the reading public is shown by the steady growth of WEIRD TALES. We shall continue to give you the kind of stories we have given you in the past. And if you like these stories, if you want to aid in building up an even greater success for your magazine, you can do so by calling the attention of your friends to the feast of imaginative reading it contains and letting them share the good things therein.

That's a pretty nice summary of the previous four years in Weird Tales. I read it as almost a progress report, or as a continuation of "Why Weird Tales?" from the first-anniversary number of May/June/July 1924. I think we have to assume that Farnsworth Wright was the author of that anonymous editorial. H.P. Lovecraft gets a lot of well-deserved credit as a theorist of weird fiction, but Wright might be right up there with him. And now we're off in search of anniversaries.

Weird Tales, May 1927, the fourth-anniversary issue, with a cover story, "The Master of Doom" by Donald Edward Keyhoe, later a flying saucer enthusiast, and cover art by C.C. Senf.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Who Was the Editor of the First-Anniversary Number of Weird Tales?

In the previous entry, I went back in time to January 30 of this year. Now I'm going even further back to almost the beginning of 2024, to an entry of January 6. That entry is entitled "Weird Tales in the First Year (and More)." A question came up in that entry, namely: Who was the editor of the first-anniversary number of Weird Tales? Some comments went back and forth. I can't say that we have a definitive answer. I'm not sure there will ever be a definitive answer. But I would like to summarize what we know.

First: Edwin Baird edited Weird Tales from its inception until, presumably, April 1924 (or maybe only March). There isn't any editor credited in that issue, nor in the issues preceding or following it. Baird was also the editor of Detective Tales, a companion title to Weird Tales and one that preceded it in print, beginning with a first issue on October 1, 1922.

In the spring of 1924, The Rural Publishing Corporation, publisher of both Weird Tales and Detective Tales, was in financial trouble. Co-founded by Jacob C. Henneberger and John M. Lansinger, The Rural Publishing Corporation came to an end with the first-anniversary number of Weird Tales of May/June/July 1924. Baird went with Lansinger and Detective Tales. That left Henneberger with Weird Tales--and no editor.

In my entry of January 6, I called the anniversary number "jumbo-sized" and a "triple issue." It was actually neither. That number, or issue as we say now, had the same number of pages as the first two issues of the magazine, 196 in each. So it wasn't jumbo-sized exactly, although that's still a lot of pages. Also, it wasn't a triple issue, even if it covered a three-month period. In fact, the May/June/July issue of 1924 was a stated quarterly issue, the first and as far as I know only quarterly issue during the first run of the magazine, i.e., from 1923 to 1954. By the way, Edwin Baird died in September 1954, which was when the last issue of Weird Tales came out. I might call that weird, or an instance of the workings of Weird.

So who was the editor of the first-anniversary number of Weird Tales?

Well, in The Weird Tales Story (1977), author Robert Weinberg wrote, without citation: "Otis Adelbert Kline and Farnsworth Wright put together one gigantic issue," i.e., the first-year anniversary issue. (p. 4)

In The Thing's Incredible! The Secret Origins of Weird Tales (2018), author John Locke went into more detail, quoting, first, Kline, who claimed editorship of the issue in a letter to Robert E. Howard's father, dated 1941; and, second, quoting Henneberger, who wrote in 1924 that Baird was the editor until the last issue, i.e., the first-anniversary issue. According to Mr. Locke, Wright had also served as an uncredited editor since April 1924. He wrote: "Wright was the actual editor of the issue in its early stages of preparation [. . .]." Wright quit the company in anger, though, at which point, "Kline was recruited as temporary editor [. . .]." (p. 168) John Locke's conclusion: "all three individuals [Baird, Wright, and Kline] edited the issue!" (p. 168)

Biographer, essayist, book reviewer, and encyclopedist Phil Stephenson-Payne left comments under my entry of January 6, 2024. He had credited Edwin Baird as editor of the first-anniversary number in his online source, The FictionMags Index. (Forget what I have done in this blog. Mr. Stephenson-Payne has done far more in his career.) He quoted an article written by Robert Weinberg and published in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Weird Fiction Magazines (Greenwood Press, 1985) as follows: that the first-anniversary number was "assembled by Jacob Henneberger and Otis A. Kline from dummies assembled by Baird." After consulting with Mike Ashley and John (presumably) Locke, he left a comment quoting John, as follows:

The short version is that Baird initiated work on the Ann[iversary] Issue in the midst of the "reorganization," which was editorial until the financial axe fell. Mid-course, Baird was pulled off of W[eird] T[ales] to devote his exclusive time to Detective Tales. Wright came in as a part-time interim editor for WT (while J[acob] C[lark] H[enneberger] unsuccessfully tried to recruit [H.P.] Lovecraft). Wright found out about the many debts to contributors, couldn't get any resolution from JCH, and stormed out in protest with the Ann[iversary] Issue unfinished. JCH got Kline to get it out the door. It's fair to say that the issue was edited by Baird, Wright, and Kline, in that order. I don't think it follows that any two of them worked together as co-editors. (Italics and boldface added.)

That sounds like a good and reasonable answer to the question: first Baird, then Wright, and finally Kline had a hand in editing the first-anniversary number, all or some with an assist from Henneberger. Lovecraft famously declined the editorship of the magazine at around that time. What a different world it would have been if he hadn't! In any case, the May/June/July 1924 issue of Weird Tales was the last for several months. Like a revenant, though, it came back in November 1924, then and for the next fifteen and a half years edited by Farnsworth Wright.

Thank you to Phil Stephenson-Payne, Mike Ashley, and John Locke for their information and clarifications. Thanks also to the late Robert Weinberg.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley. Text and comments by John Locke and Phil Stephenson-Payne are their own property.

Weird Tales, November 1923

There are seventeen stories in the November 1923 issue of Weird Tales, plus "The Eyrie," the second installment of the feature "Weird Crimes" by Seabury Quinn, and eleven uncredited non-fiction fillers. The cover art was by the as yet unidentified artist Washburn, his or her only cover for "The Unique Magazine." R.M. Mally. Once again, all of the interior art was by William F. Heitman (1878-1945).

• "Draconda," part one of a six-part serial by John Martin Leahy (1886-1967), an artist and writer of Washington State. "Draconda" would prove to be one of the longest serials to appear in Weird Tales.

• "The Crawling Death" by P. A. Connolly (dates unknown), according to The FictionMags Index, a revised version of "Crawling Hands," originally in The Thrill Book, May 15 and June 1, 1919.

• "A Heroine of the Black Hole," non-fiction filler by an uncredited author.

• "The Closed Room" by Maebelle McCalment (ca. 1878-1950) of Missouri.

• "The Phantom Violinist" by Walter F. McCanless (1876-1965) of North Carolina.

• "Girl, Gypsy All Her Life, Turns from Wilds," non-fiction filler by an uncredited author.

• "Gas Bombs to Check Forest Fires," non-fiction filler by an uncredited author.

• "Lucifer" by John D. Swain (1870-1952), a native New Englander.

• "Wife Slayer Drives All Night with Body in Auto," non-fiction filler by an uncredited author.

• "The Spider" by Arthur Edwards Chapman (1898-?).

• "The Amazing Adventure of Joe Scranton," part two of a two-part serial by Effie W. Fifield (1857-1937) of Minnesota.

• "The Iron Room" by Irish-Welsh-British author Francis D. Grierson (1888-1972), starring his series character Paul Pry, a London-based detective.

• "World-Famed 'Blue Man' Dies," non-fiction filler by an uncredited author. The "blue man" of the title was Fred Walters, who was said to have worked in a silver mine in Australia. If he was poisoned with silver, then he had something in common with Evangeline Walton (1907-1996), a later teller of weird tales.

• "Prisoners of the Dead" by J. Paul Suter (1884-1970). It was Suter's third story for Weird Tales.

• "The Death Pit" by Oscar Schisgall (1901-1984), a foreign-born author then probably living in New York City.

• "The Wax Image," called "A Weird Chinese Story" and written by Burton Harcourt (dates unknown).

• "'Devil's Grip' Spreading," non-fiction filler by an uncredited author.

• "Poisoned" by Farnsworth Wright (1888-1940), his fifth and last story published under his own name in Weird Tales. Wright became editor of the magazine a year later, beginning with the November 1924 issue.

• "New Mecca for Divorce Hunters," non-fiction filler by an uncredited author.

• "British Missionaries Slain by Chinese Bandits," non-fiction filler by an uncredited author.

• "The Magic Mirror" by Mary S. Brown (dates unknown).

• "The Invisible Monster" by Sonia H. Greene (1883-1972) and an uncredited H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937). The two had met in 1921. Four months after the publication of their short-story collaboration, on March 3, 1924, they were married in Manhattan.

• "The Pebble Prophecy," a Halloween story by Valens Lapsley (dates unknown). I suspect that Valens Lapsley was a pseudonym. If I look for meaning, I see that Valens was the name of a Roman emperor. The word valens is from the Latin, meaning "strength" or "to be strong." In Spanish, valen means "to have value." If I look for the surname Lapsley, I find a woman named Mary Lapsley Caughey (1899-1964), who was a scholar, poet, teacher, translator, and novelist from Pennsylvania. Her two early short works, "Theocritus" and "The Priest and Pan," are on classical themes and subjects. After attending Sewickley Preparatory School, Vassar College, and Bryn Mawr College, she studied Spanish and French at the University of Brussels in the early 1920s. If Valens Lapsley was a pseudonym, then I would look at her as a good candidate as the writer behind the name.

• "The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849).

• "The Grave Robbers," the second installment of "Weird Crimes" by Seabury Quinn (1889-1969).

• "Saved from Fiery Death by Locomotive Bell," non-fiction filler by an uncredited author.

• "$600,000 for Study of Spiritualism," non-fiction filler by an uncredited author.

• "The Survivor," "A Five-Minute Tale" by Edwin G. Wood (1864-1934). Edwin Goodenow Wood was the brother of Theodore Snow Wood (1877-1940), who had had a story, "People vs. Bland," in the July/August 1923 issue of Weird Tales.

• "Will Use Tear Gas on Bootleggers," non-fiction filler by an uncredited author.

• "The Eyrie."

That November issue was the last of 1923. In all, there were eight issues of Weird Tales published in its first calendar year, from March to November 1923. The publication schedule would pick up again in January 1924 and run through the triple-issue of May-June-July 1924. Crisis struck then, and Weird Tales, which came close to dying in mid 1924, returned in November and a thirty-year run under the editorship of Farnsworth Wright (from 1924 to 1940) and Dorothy McIlwraith (from 1940 to 1954). And of course Weird Tales is still in print in 2023, its centennial year.

Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

The Moon Terror (and other stories)

Published in 1927, The Moon Terror by A.G. Birch was the first Weird Tales book. The publisher was the Popular Fiction Publishing Company of Indianapolis. The uncredited editor was almost certainly Farnsworth Wright. You wouldn't know it by the cover, but there are actually four stories in The Moon Terror. They are:

• "The Moon Terror" by A.G. Birch, a novel of 130 pages, originally serialized in the May and June 1923 issues of Weird Tales.

• "Ooze" by Anthony M. Rud, a novelette of 33 pages, originally the first cover story in Weird Tales, in the March issue of 1923.

• "Penelope" by Vincent Starrett, a comic short story of 16 pages, originally in Weird Tales, May 1923.

and

• "An Adventure in the Fourth Dimension" by Farnsworth Wright, another comic short story of just 9 pages, originally in Weird Tales in October 1923.

There are 192 pages in all in The Moon Terror, the same number of pages as in each of the first two issues of Weird Tales.

"The Moon Terror" is the cover story of The Moon Terror the book. The illustration on the cover, drawn by an unknown artist, is a version of the first illustration to appear in Weird Tales. It shows a human sacrificial ritual in the instant before the knife is plunged into the breast of a naked woman. It's not in the best taste. It's also not an especially good drawing. And that brings up an issue.

If it was published in 1927, then The Moon Terror had about four years' worth of stories on which to draw for its contents. "Ooze" is a good enough story I think. The others are passable, I guess. But there were better stories published in those first four years. Did we really need Starrett's or Wright's story reprinted in book form? Imagine instead The Call of Cthulhu and Other Stories, published in 1927, with cover art and interior illustrations by Hugh Rankin! And as for the book itself, it's not an especially well-made volume. My copy is still in good condition (no dust jacket), but, again, it's not the most professional of printing and binding jobs, the paper and boards are not high in quality, and the design is pretty ho-hum.

"The Moon Terror" is a yellow-peril story. The threat emanates from China, and the man who wishes to control the world and every person in it is Chinese. He fancies himself, I think, as a kind of god-emperor. The American scientist Dr. Gresham stands in his way:

"Gentlemen," he said, "I did not come here to argue; I came to help! As surely as I am standing here, our world is upon the brink of dissolution! And I alone may be able to save it! But, if I am to do so, you must agree absolutely to the course of action I propose!" (p. 46)

Three and a half years ago, we experienced another threat emanating from China and its aspiring world-ruler. And we had an American scientist--not just a scientist but a man who went by the self-proclaimed title The Science--tell us that if we were to be saved, we must do whatever he commanded. He alone was able to save us. Call all of this a century-old prognostication made by A.G. Birch. In any case, if you would like to read "The Moon Terror," you should probably do so soon, before President Eleven requires that all traces of it be wiped out and our obeisant government, media, and corporations do as he commands.

I have already written at length about "Ooze" and a little about "Penelope." I'll close with a couple of quick comments on "An Adventure in the Fourth Dimension" by Farnsworth Wright. I don't think that Wright was an especially good writer. Editorship was his true calling (even if he made a few blunders in that department as well.) However, his story in The Moon Terror was an early exploration in Weird Tales of Einsteinian or relativistic physics. For that, Wright deserves some credit.

"An Adventure in the Fourth Dimension" is told in the first person by a man in Chicago who picked up some French expressions while serving in the U.S. Army. As it so happens, Farnsworth Wright lived in Chicago (as well as in Indianapolis), and he was a translator in the Army during the Great War. There are aliens in his story. They arrive on Earth by falling out of the sky in a meteoric missile. You could say that the story is a UFO story before we had a name for these things. With its falling objects, it also has a hint of a Fortean tale. There is mention of transparent steel, which makes me think of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home and its manufacture of transparent aluminum.

As they say, there is nothing new under the sun. Or under the moon.

The Moon Terror by A.G. Birch and others (1927), with a cover illustration by an unknown artist.

Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Farnsworth Wright (1888-1940)-A Short Short Story

Newspaper Reporter, Soldier, Translator, Author, Editor, Music Critic
Born July 29, 1888, Santa Barbara, California
Died June 12, 1940, Jackson Heights, New York

I have stayed away from writing a biography of Farnsworth Wright. Luckily, I found a source that will allow me to go on avoiding that task. My source is a biographical article in a series called "Titans of Science Fiction," printed in the fanzine Science Fiction Digest, Combined with The Time Traveler, in Volume 1, Number 7, from March 1933. The editor was Maurice Z. Ingher; associate editors were Mortimer Weisinger, Raymond A. Palmer, and Julius Schwartz; and contributing editors were Forrest J. Ackerman and Henry Schalansky. The article itself was written anonymously. Wright may have himself been the author. I found this issue of Science Fiction Digest in a most timely way, on Saturday last week. It's from the collection of Margaret B. Nicholas of Bartlett and Marietta, Ohio. I found it at the same place as her larger collection, much of which I purchased last year.

TITANS OF SCIENCE FICTION

FARNSWORTH WRIGHT

    Editor of Weird Tales since November, 1924, was born in California forty-five years ago. Has English, Scotch, and French blood in him. Lived in San Francisco until 1906 when the earthquake 'threw' him out.

   Was bitten early with the editorial bug. When attending a San Francisco High School, he published an amateur magazine, "The Laurel," which he edited, wrote, and printed himself on a hand press belonging to a friend.

    Was educated at the University of Nevada and the University of Washington. While at the latter he was managing editor of their daily paper. Had to work his way through college. Spent one year surveying, one summer canvassing books, another summer as entomologist for the British Columbia Hop-Company, campaigning against the hop-fleas and the hop-lice.

    When the United State got into the Big Scrap he went to France as a private in the infantry. Was acquainted with French well enough to act as a French interpreter in the A.E.F. for one year.

    Returned to resume life as a newspaper reporter in Chicago. Was the music critic for the Chicago Herald and Examiner (the Hearst Morning paper in the Windy City) for two years.

    Wrote stories and read manuscripts for Weird Tales when Edwin Baird was editor from 1923-1924, and later became its editor when the Popular Fiction Publishing Company bought the magazine in 1924.

    He is the author of about 40 stories altogether, but story-writing is merely an avocation with him. Has written but one science fiction story, "An Adventure in the Fourth Dimension," an uproarious satire on interplanetary stories and science fiction in general. It was reprinted twice: in the Ten Story Book, and again with "The Moon Terror."

    It is rumored that Mr. Wright writes under the nom-de-plume of Francis Hard, whose stories and poems have appeared in Weird Tales and Oriental Stories--but he prefers not to say anything about it.

    His favorite relaxations are chess and swimming, he prefers to read books dealing with science and history. His favorite poet is Keats, favorite story-writer is Alphonse Daudet, but thinks William Morris' "A King' Lesson" is the best short story he's read. Likes to see Mickey Mouse on the screen in preference to anyone else, and considers Master Robert Wright, age three, his favorite hobby.

* * *

It goes on from there, but that's enough for now. "Master Robert Wright," by the way, was Wright's son, Robert Farnsworth Wright (1930-1993). How strange it is to hold a publication from ninety years ago in one's hand, a publication that was new and fresh when a long-dead man was just a three-year-old boy.

"Francis Hard" was in fact a nom-de-plume of Farnsworth Wright. (Hard was his mother's maiden name.) He began using that nom-de-plume only after he had assumed the role of editor of Weird Tales in November 1924. In all, Wright had five stories in Weird Tales from March through November 1923, plus three short stories and five poems in Weird Tales, Oriental Stories, and The Magic Carpet Magazine from November 1924 to October 1937. So there was precedent for an editor to use a pseudonym while still having his works printed in Weird Tales. Maybe Lamont Buchanan, later associate editor, availed himself of that practice during the 1940s and '50s.

Farnsworth Wright's Stories in Weird Tales

• "The Closing Hand" (Mar. 1923)
• "The Snake Fiend" (Apr. 1923)
• "The Teak-Wood Shrine" (Sept. 1923)
• "An Adventure in the Fourth Dimension" (Oct. 1923; reprinted in The Moon Terror [1923] and in The Best of Weird Tales: 1923 [1997])
• "Poisoned" (Nov. 1923)

Stories & Poems by Farnsworth Wright Writing as Francis Hard in Weird Tales, Oriental Stories, and The Magic Carpet Magazine

• "The Great Panjandrum" in Weird Tales (short story, Nov. 1924)
• "The Dark Pool" in Weird Tales (poem, Apr. 1925)
• "The Death Angel" in Weird Tales (poem, Sept. 1925)
• "Two Crows" in Weird Tales (poem, Jan. 1925)
• "The Evening Star" in Weird Tales (poem, Mar. 1926) 
• "The White Queen" in Oriental Stories (short story, Oct./Nov. 1930)
• "The Picture of Judas" in The Magic Carpet Magazine (short story, Apr. 1933)
• "After Two Nights of the Ear-ache" in Weird Tales (poem, Oct. 1937)

Farnsworth Wright's Story:

"The Closing Hand" is a very short story of only two pages. It takes place in an old house at night, with two sisters lying together in an upstairs bedroom and the younger of them talking about how the place might be haunted. The older sister is more level-headed and proceeds to fall asleep. There are sounds downstairs. The younger sister wakes the older, who goes to investigate. She is gone for too long. A presence comes into the room and . . .

"The Closing Hand" is written more or less at a high school level. It begins as a haunted house story and ends as a simple crime story. It reads like a sequence from a modern horror movie.

In its issue of September 1, 1922, the Chicago Tribune asked the man on the street, "What do you think of Health commissioner's Bundesen's 'public' health plan?" Farnworth Wright, then aged thirty-three, provided this answer.

Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Miscellany No. 4

In his recent book The Thing's Incredible! The Secret Origins of Weird Tales, 1923-1924, author John Locke reprinted Farnsworth Wright's poem "Self-Portrait," from Fantasy Magazine, April 1935. Wright began his versifying with these words: "The editor's a gloomy guy who fusses, fumes and frets." By the end of the poem, Wright had mentioned all kinds of monsters, including the zombie, here in reference to himself as editor: "A zombie he, undead, yet dead; immortal, and yet mortal." I guess that's one small piece of evidence to show how quickly the zombie moved into American popular culture in the 1930s. Once an obscure Haitian legend, zombies were referred to in common usage in America in less than a decade, from their first appearance in 1928 to Farnsworth Wright's poem of 1935.

Original text copyright 2019, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Oscar Cook (1888-1952)

Richard Martin Oscar Cook
Civil Servant, Author, Editor, Publisher, Actor, Playwright, Businessman
Born March 17, 1888, Tollington Park, Islington, Middlesex, England
Died February 23, 1952, Kensington, London, England

On May 14, 2016, I wrote about Christine Campbell Thomson, editor of the Not at Night series of weird tales in hardback. Today I'll write a little on her first husband. He was born Richard Martin Oscar Cook on March 17, 1888, in Tollington Park, Islington, England. From 1911 to 1919, Cook served in the British civil service in North Borneo. By 1920, he was back in his home country. In the early 1920s, he wrote about his experiences in Borneo. In the process of having his book published, Cook met Christine Campbell Thomson (1897-1985), a literary agent and editor. She had the book placed with the house of Hurst & Blackett, and it was published in August 1924 as Borneo: The Stealer of Hearts. Cook had still more stories of Borneo published in The Blue Magazine, Hutchinson’s Adventure-Story Magazine, Hutchinson’s Mystery-Story Magazine, and The Novel Magazine. He and Christine were married on September 30, 1924, in London and divorced more than a decade later, in 1937 or 1938.

I don't suppose that anyone now knows what relationship Christine Campbell Thomson had with Farnsworth Wright, editor of Weird Tales from 1924 to 1940. Suffice it to say that of the 170 stories published in the Not at Night series, 100 came from Weird Tales; that the Not at Night series (1925-1937) was published during the years that Wright was still editor and Weird Tales was still based either in Indianapolis or Chicago (1924-1938) and had not been sold to Short Stories, Inc., or had moved to New York City; and that Christine secured for Wright a number of stories by British authors--including herself and her husband--for publication in Weird Tales. I wonder if she was on the lookout for stories by Continental authors as well and whether that's how certain stories by such authors ended up in the pages of the American magazine. I wonder, too, if she ever traveled to the United States, and if so, if she ever met her American counterpart.

Speaking of Oscar Cook's short stories, here's a list:

Short Stories

• "Golden Lilies" in Hutchinson's Adventure-Story Magazine (Sept. 1922; reprinted in Keep On The Light, 1933; More Not At Night, 1961, 1963; Never at Night, 1972).

• "Si Urag of the Tail" in Hutchinson's Adventure-Story Magazine (Jan. 1923; reprinted in Weird Tales, July 1926; You'll Need a Night Light, 1927; A Century of Creepy Stories, 1934; 50 Strangest Stories Ever Told, 1937; Still Not At Night, 1962; Startling Mystery Stories, Spring 1967; Only By Daylight, 1972).

• "On the Highway" in Weird Tales, Jan. 1925.

• "The Creature of Man" in Hutchinson's Mystery-Story Magazine (Apr. 1925; reprinted in Weird Tales, Nov. 1926; reprinted as "Dog Death" in Terror By Night, 1934).

• "The Great White Fear" in Hutchinson's Adventure-Story Magazine (June 1925; reprinted in Grim Death, 1932; A Century of Creepy Stories, 1934).

• "The Sacred Jars" in Weird Tales (Mar. 1927; reprinted as "When Glister Walks" in Gruesome Cargoes, July 1928; A Century of Creepy Stories, 1934; 50 Strangest Stories Ever Told, 1937; Not At Night: Tales That Freeze The Blood, 1960, 1962).

• "Piecemeal" in By Daylight Only (Oct. 1929; reprinted in Weird Tales, Feb. 1930; Not At Night Omnibus, 1937; The Second Pan Book of Horror Stories, 1960).

• "Boomerang" in Switch on the Light (1931; reprinted in A Century of Creepy Stories, 1934; The Second Pan Book of Horror Stories, 1960).

• "His Beautiful Hands" in At Dead of Night (1931; reprinted in Not At Night Omnibus, 1937; The Pan Book of Horror Stories, 1959).

• "The Crimson Head-Dress" in Nightmare By Daylight (1936).

His story "Boomerang," retitled "The Caterpillar," was adapted to television in Rod Serling's Night Gallery and broadcast on March 1, 1972. Cook was also author of the novel The Seventh Wave (1926) translated into Dutch as Gij zult niet.

Oscar Cook died on February 23, 1952, in Kensington, England, at age sixty-three.

Oscar Cook's Stories in Weird Tales

See the list of short stories above.

Further Reading

See Douglas A. Anderson's blog Lesser-Known Writers for April 3, 2012, here.

Text copyright 2016, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Final Notes from PulpFest

On Saturday evening, August 15, 2015, a panel of enthusiasts and scholars got together at PulpFest in Columbus, Ohio, to talk about the editors of Weird Tales. The panelists were Garyn Roberts, Morgan Holmes, Don Herron, Will Murray, and moderator Tom Krabacher. Their talk is called "Weird Editing at 'The Unique Magazine'." You can hear it on the website The Pulp.Net, here.

On the day of the talk, someone warned me that it could become contentious. I have wondered about the politics behind pulp magazine research and about Weird Tales in particular. I am not an insider in the world of pulps and really have no experience with the political side of things. I asked what the contentiousness might be about but came away without anything concrete. As it turned out, the talk was mostly friendly and only a little contentious. Evidently things were worked out before it began. I have a feeling, though, that the politics of Weird Tales involves mostly H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard--and probably August Derleth, too. Lovecraft and Howard may at times have been handled a little roughly by the magazine. For fans, that kind of handling may very well amount to an unforgivable crime.

I made only a few notes during the talk. Here they are, fleshed out:

• Regarding the origins of Weird Tales, Will Murray mentioned a letter written by Henry S. Whitehead and published in The Writer magazine in 1921 or 1922. In his letter, Whitehead complained about the lack of outlets for stories of ghosts and fairies. That caught my interest, so I looked it up. The letter is called "Editorial Prejudice Against the Occult." It was published in The Writer in October 1922, Volume 34, Number 10, pp. 146-147. You can read the text in Google Books and on the blog Tentaclii::H.P. Lovecraft Blog, August 13, 2014, here. Whitehead got his wish just five months later with the debut of Weird Tales. He went on to have twenty-six stories published in "The Unique Magazine."

• One of the panelists--I think it was Don Herron--brought up Lovecraft's ghostwriting for Harry Houdini. I made a note at that point: "Houdini helped Lovecraft escape from his marriage." My chain of thought in writing that is lost, but Lovecraft returned from New York City to Providence in April 1926. Houdini died six months later, on October 31, 1926. Lovecraft had previously ghostwritten "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs," published in the triple-issue Weird Tales of May/June/July 1924. Lovecraft lost his draft of the story on his way to marrying Sonia Greene. He spent his honeymoon retyping the story. By the time two years had passed, Lovecraft was back in the city of his birth and his marriage was for all intents and purposes over.

• J.C. Henneberger famously offered the editorship of Weird Tales to H.P. Lovecraft in 1924. Lovecraft famously declined. In a way, though, Lovecraft was an editor in the way that an editor works with a circle of authors, developing them, mentoring them, encouraging them, suggesting revisions, rewriting stories, etc.

• H.P. Lovecraft was rejected by Weird Tales on several occasions, as Morgan Holmes pointed out in the talk, but he ultimately rejected himself by not acting professionally, retyping his manuscripts, seizing opportunities, or persisting in his pursuit of being a writer; also by excusing himself from work as an old-fashioned gentleman or dilettante, by talking down his work, by giving up easily, in short, by his evident passivity and low self-esteem.

• The talk at PulpFest was about fifty minutes long. Edwin Baird got a couple of minutes. Dorothy McIlwraith, who edited the magazine for fourteen years, got about the same. Dorothy is often passed over, but one of the panelists made a good point, that she may not have published stories as good as those published under Farnsworth Wright, but she also didn't publish stories that were as bad. Otherwise, talk of Wright dominated "Weird Editing at 'The Unique Magazine'." Opinion of him was mixed as it seems to be in general among readers of the pulps.

So that ends my series on Notes from PulpFest. Now on to other things.

The cover of Pinkie at Camp Cherokee, a children's novel by Henry S. Whitehead from 1931.

Text copyright 2015, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Happy Birthday, General Relativity!

The modern world began on 29 May 1919 when photographs of a solar eclipse, taken on the island of Principe off West Africa and at Sobral in Brazil, confirmed the truth of a new theory of the universe.

--from Modern Times by Paul Johnson (Harper, 1983)

One hundred years ago today, on November 25, 1915, Albert Einstein presented a paper to the Prussian Academy of Sciences, a paper that set forth a theory that radically remade the world. The theory was General Relativity, and it was confirmed, as Paul Johnson wrote, four years after its presentation, when the light of a distant star was shown to have bent around the sun. People would go on talking about the interstellar ether and other outmoded concepts for years afterwards, but to those who were paying attention to such things, relativity presented new possibilities.

Paul Johnson's thesis is that relativity passed from science into other fields of thought:

At the beginning of the 1920s the belief began to circulate, for the first time at a popular level, that there were no longer any absolutes: of time and space, of good and evil, of knowledge, above all of value. Mistakenly but inevitably, relativity became confused with relativism. (p. 4)

Coupled to Freudianism, Darwinism, Marxism, and other nineteenth-century isms, relativism helped make the horrors of the twentieth (and twenty-first) century possible. None of that can be laid at Einstein's feet, of course, but the confusion of relativism with relativity is an example of how "[t]he scientific genius impinges on humanity, for good or ill, far more than any statesman or warlord." (p. 5) I might add that the words "scientific moron" or "pseudoscientific genius" might easily be substituted for "scientific genius" in Paul Johnson's formulation.

Relativity opened doors of imagination for writers and artists as well as for scientists and dictators. In January 1919, before the British expedition to the southern hemisphere to take pictures of the solar eclipse, the first magazine devoted to fantasy fiction, Der Orchideengarten, went to press in Einstein's home country of Germany. The Thrill Book, an American magazine, followed in March of that year. Four years later, in March 1923, Weird Tales began. That magazine, "The Unique Magazine," was the first American magazine of its kind. By the time it went into publication, writers, just like the general public, were at least aware of Einstein and his theories, even if they didn't quite understand them. H.P. Lovecraft, an amateur astronomer and a man of great learning, famously mentioned Einstein in his work. So did his followers. "The Whisperer in Darkness" by Lovecraft (Weird Tales, Aug. 1931) and "The Hounds of Tindalos" by Frank Belknap Long, Jr. (Weird Tales, Mar. 1929) are among the stories touching upon Einstein and relativity. Both stories invoke the possibilities of time travel by relativistic physics.

I don't know who was first among Weird Tales writers to mention Einstein and relativity, but future editor Farnsworth Wright is a candidate, for in October 1923, Weird Tales published his story "An Adventure in the Fourth Dimension." It's a humorous story and not one likely to appeal to Lovecraft fans. I won't spoil the ending any more than it's already spoiled. "An Adventure in the Fourth Dimension" was reprinted in The Moon Terror (1927) and The Best of Weird Tales: 1923 (1997).

Since it was first propounded, relativity has made more than horrors possible. It has also helped us make things of elegance and beauty, including works of art. Without it, science fiction would still live in the age of the ether, which was fine in its time, but limited. Now the only limit is c, and even that is no great obstacle to the science fiction imagination. So Happy Birthday to General Relativity!

Further Reading
"H.P. Lovecraft and Albert Einstein," a four-part article on the blog Lovecraftian Science: Scientific Investigations into the Cthulhu Mythos, beginning February 23, 2014, here.

Intellectuals--scientists, writers, college professor types--like to believe that their ideas are important and influential. Too often, they try to make their ideas important by forcing them on to others. Few things enrage them more than being ignored. Einstein was different: people paid attention. But maybe not as much as what he and others thought. Leave it to the cartoonist to puncture intellectual self-importance. That's what Rea Irvin did with this drawing for The New Yorker, reprinted in The Second New Yorker Album (1929).

The first Weird Tales anthology was The Moon Terror by A.G. Birch and Stories by Anthony M. Rud, Vincent Starrett and Farnsworth Wright, published in 1927 by Popular Fiction Publishing of Indianapolis. Among the four stories in the book is "An Adventure in the Fourth Dimension" by Wright, future editor of "The Unique Magazine." The cover artist is unknown. It could very well have been William F. Heitman. 

Wright's story was reprinted seventy years later in The Best of Weird Tales: 1923 (1997). This is the only volume in what looked like it was going to be a series. Someone ought to continue it, but that doesn't seem likely to happen. The cover artist is Stephen Fabian.

Original text and captions copyright 2015, 2023 Terence E. Hanley