page_title: History of US science fiction and fantasy magazines to 1950
section_title: Weird Tales and Amazing Stories
hierarchical_section_title: History of US science fiction and fantasy magazines to 1950 / Weird Tales and Amazing Stories
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Umschlag der ersten Ausgabe des Pulp-Magazins Weird Tales vom März 1923. Umschlag von R.R. Epperly (Richard Ruh Epperly, 1891-1973). Enthält die Erzählung Ooze von Anthony M. Rud.English: Cover of the pulp magazine Weird Tales (March 1923, vol. 1, no. 1) featuring Ooze by Anthony M. Rud.
context_page_description: Science-fiction and fantasy magazines began to be published in the United States in the 1920s. Stories with science-fiction themes had been appearing for decades in pulp magazines such as Argosy, but there were no magazines that specialized in a single genre until 1915, when Street & Smith, one of the major pulp publishers, brought out Detective Story Magazine. The first magazine to focus solely on fantasy and horror was Weird Tales, which was launched in 1923, and established itself as the leading weird fiction magazine over the next two decades; writers such as H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard became regular contributors. In 1926 Weird Tales was joined by Amazing Stories, published by Hugo Gernsback; Amazing printed only science fiction, and no fantasy. Gernsback included a letter column in Amazing Stories, and this led to the creation of organized science-fiction fandom, as fans contacted each other using the addresses published with the letters.
context_section_description: The first magazine to be primarily associated with fantasy and science fiction was Weird Tales, which appeared in March 1923. It was initially edited by Edwin Baird and issued by Rural Publishing, a company owned by Jacob Clark Henneberger and John M. Lansinger.  Rural had previously launched the magazine Detective Tales.  Weird Tales was intended to provide a market for fantasy and weird fiction, and Henneberger was keen to obtain material unusual enough that it could not be sold to the existing pulp magazines. The planned monthly schedule soon began to slip, skipping July and December. As early as February 1924, Farnsworth Wright took over from Baird as interim editor. After the May-June-July 1924 Anniversary Issue was published, Henneberger and Lansinger split the company, each taking one of the magazines. Henneberger kept nominal control of Weird Tales, while the Cornelius Printing Company, of Indianapolis, to whom Rural owed most of its debt, took over primary ownership. The magazine went on hiatus for five months while Cornelius built a new printing plant. Weird Tales resumed publication with the November 1924 issue, with Farnsworth Wright as permanent editor. The magazine quickly began to improve, both in appearance and quality, as Wright nurtured talented fantasy writers such as Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft.
  Wright frequently published science fiction, including Edmond Hamilton's first story, which appeared in August 1926, and work by J. Schlossel and Otis Adelbert Kline,  as well as weird and occult fiction.  The first magazine devoted entirely to science fiction joined Weird Tales on the newsstands on 10 March 1926, titled Amazing Stories and dated April.  Gernsback had delayed the launch a couple of years after his subscriber survey had shown only limited interest in a science fiction magazine, but finally decided to take the plunge.  He ceased publication of Practical Electrics (recently retitled The Experimenter) but retained the editor, T. O'Conor Sloane, to edit the new magazine, though Gernsback had final say over the fiction content.  The first issue of Amazing consisted entirely of reprinted material, including Jules Verne's novel Off on a Comet, and stories by H.G. Wells and Edgar Allan Poe, but new fiction quickly appeared, with Clare Winger Harris and A. Hyatt Verrill each finding success in one of Gernsback's early reader competitions.  Both went on to become established writers.  Gernsback also introduced a letter column, and encouraged his readers to join in lively discussions there.  In the view of Mike Ashley, a historian of science fiction, this was "the real secret of  the success of Amazing Stories and is the cause of the popularity of science fiction": the letter column gave science-fiction fans, many of whom were lonely, a forum in which to make friends and talk about their interests.  The resulting community of like-minded readers gave birth to science-fiction fandom, and also to a generation of writers who had grown up reading the genre.
  Amazing was very successful, reaching a circulation of 100,000 in less than a year.  It was some time before significant competition appeared, but two minor fantasy magazines were launched the year after Amazing's first issue.  One, Tales of Magic and Mystery appeared in 1927 and lasted only five issues; it specialized in stories about magic, including a series on Houdini.  It was a financial failure, and is now remembered mainly for having published "Cool Air", a story by Lovecraft.  The other was Ghost Stories, which was launched in mid-1926 by Bernarr Macfadden, who also published confessional magazines such as True Story.  Much of the material in Ghost Stories was written in a similar confessional style, featuring tales of encounters with ghosts presented as true events.
  In June 1927 Gernsback published Amazing Stories Annual, twice the size (and twice the price) of the regular Amazing Stories.  It carried a new Mars novel, The Mastermind of Mars, by Edgar Rice Burroughs, which Burroughs had been unable to sell elsewhere, perhaps because it con
caption: First issue of Weird Tales, dated March 1923. Cover art by R.R. Epperly.
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