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American fantasy and horror fiction pulp magazine
the pulp magazine

Weird Tales is an American fantasy and horror fiction pulp magazine founded by J. C. Henneberger and J. M. Lansinger in late 1922. The first issue, dated March 1923, appeared on newsstands February 18. The first editor, Edwin Baird, printed early work by H. P. Lovecraft, Seabury Quinn, and Clark Ashton Smith, all of whom went on to be popular writers, but within a year, the magazine was in financial trouble. Henneberger sold his interest in the publisher, Rural Publishing Corporation, to Lansinger, and refinanced Weird Tales, with Farnsworth Wright as the new editor. The first issue to list Wright as editor was dated November 1924. The magazine was more successful under Wright, and despite occasional financial setbacks, it prospered over the next 15 years. Under Wright's control, the magazine lived up to its subtitle, "The Unique Magazine", and published a wide range of unusual fiction. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos stories first appeared in Weird Tales, starting with "The Call of Cthulhu" in 1928. These were well received, and a group of writers associated with Lovecraft wrote other stories set in the same milieu. Robert E. Howard was a regular contributor, and published several of his Conan the Barbarian stories in the magazine, and Seabury Quinn's series of stories about Jules de Grandin, a detective who specialized in cases involving the supernatural, was very popular with the readers. Other well liked authors included Nictzin Dyalhis, E. Hoffmann Price, Robert Bloch, and H. Warner Munn. Wright published some science fiction, along with the fantasy and horror, partly because when Weird Tales was launched, no magazines were specializing in science fiction, but he continued this policy even after the launch of magazines such as Amazing Stories in 1926. Edmond Hamilton wrote a good deal of science fiction for Weird Tales, though after a few years, he used the magazine for his more fantastic stories, and submitted his space operas elsewhere. In 1938, the magazine was sold to William Delaney, the publisher of Short Stories, and within two years, Wright, who was ill, was replaced by Dorothy McIlwraith as editor. Although some successful new authors and artists, such as Ray Bradbury and Hannes Bok, continued to appear, the magazine is considered by critics to have declined under McIlwraith from its heyday in the 1930s. Weird Tales ceased publication in 1954, but since then, numerous attempts have been made to relaunch the magazine, starting in 1973. The longest lasting version began in 1988 and ran with an occasional hiatus for over 20 years under an assortment of publishers. In the mid 1990s, the title was changed to Worlds of Fantasy and Horror because of licensing issues, the original title returning in 1998. The magazine is regarded by historians of fantasy and science fiction as a legend in the field, Robert Weinberg considering it "the most important and influential of all fantasy magazines". Weird fiction, science fiction, and fantasy all appeared frequently in the pulps of the day, but by the early 1920s, still no single magazine was focused on any of these genres, though The Thrill Book, launched in 1919 by Street & Smith with the intention of printing "different", or unusual, stories, was a near miss. In 1922, J. C. Henneberger, the publisher of College Humor and The Magazine of Fun, formed Rural Publishing Corporation of Chicago, in partnership with his former fraternity brother, J. M. Lansinger. Their first venture was Detective Tales, a pulp magazine that appeared twice a month, starting with the October 1, 1922 issue. It was initially unsuccessful, and as part of a refinancing plan, Henneberger decided to publish another magazine that would allow him to split some of his costs between the two titles. Henneberger had long been an admirer of Edgar Allan Poe, so he created a fiction magazine that would focus on horror, and titled it Weird Tales.

Henneberger gave Weird Tales the subtitle "The Unique Magazine" from the first issue. Henneberger had been hoping for submissions of "off trail", or unusual, material. He later recalled talking to three well known Chicago writers, Hamlin Garland, Emerson Hough, and Ben Hecht, each of whom had said they avoided writing stories of "fantasy, the bizarre, and the outré" because of the likelihood of rejection by existing markets.

[[File:Weird Tales March 1923. jpg|thumb|First issue of Weird Tales, dated March 1923. The cover art is by R. R. Epperly. The cover story for the first issue was "Ooze", by Anthony M. Rud; there was also the first installment of a serial, "The Thing of A Thousand Shapes", by Otis Adelbert Kline, and 22 other stories. Ashley suggests that the better pulp writers from whom Baird did manage to acquire material, such as Francis Stevens and Austin Hall, were sending Baird stories which had already been rejected elsewhere. It appeared in the October 1923 issue, which was the most noteworthy of Baird's tenure, since it included stories by three writers who would become frequent contributors to Weird Tales: as well as Lovecraft, it marked the first appearance in the magazine of Frank Owen and Seabury Quinn. Robert Weinberg, in his history of Weird Tales, agrees with Ashley that the quality of Baird's issues was poor, but comments that some good stories were published: "it was just that the percentage of such stories was dismally small". It was Henneberger who came up with another idea involving Lovecraft: Henneberger contacted Harry Houdini and made arrangements to have Lovecraft ghost write a story for him using a plot supplied by Houdini. The story, "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs", appeared under Houdini's name in the May/June/July 1924 issue, though it was nearly lost—Lovecraft left the typed manuscript on the train he took to New York to get married, and as a result spent much of his wedding day retyping the manuscript from the longhand copy he still had. The May/June/July 1924 issue included another story: "The Loved Dead", by C. M. Eddy Jr. which included a mention of necrophilia. According to Eddy, this led to the magazine being removed from the newsstands in several cities, and beneficial publicity for the magazine, helping sales, but in his history of Weird Tales Robert Weinberg reports that he found no evidence of the magazine being banned, and the financial state of the magazine implies there was no benefit to sales either. S. T. Joshi, Lovecraft's biographer, contends that the magazine was indeed removed from newsstands in Indiana, but according to John Locke, a magazine historian, the suggestion that there was ever a public reaction to the story is a misinterpretation of comments made by Lovecraft about the story. The cover art during Baird's tenure was dull; Ashley calls it "unattractive", Weinberg also regards the interior art during the magazine's first year as very weak; most of the interior drawings were small, and with little of the atmosphere one would expect from a horror magazine. All the illustrations were by Heitman, whom Weinberg describes as "  notable for his complete lack of imagination. Heitman's specialty was taking the one scene in a frightening story that featured nothing at all frightening or weird and illustrating that".

thumb|Cover of the November 1941 issue, by Hannes Bok|left|alt=A skeleton writing with a quill pen at a high deskMcIlwraith was an experienced magazine editor, but she knew little about weird fiction, and unlike Wright she also had to face real competition from other magazines for Weird Tales' core readership. Without the reprints Weird Tales was left to survive on the rejects from Unknown, the same authors selling to both markets. In Weinberg's words, "only the quality of the stories [separated] their work between the two pulps". refn|Lowndes was later to discover that it was almost certainly Smith's story "The Coming of the White Worm" which Delaney was referring to; it was eventually published by Donald Wollheim in Stirring Science Stories. In May 1951 Weird Tales once again began to include reprints, in an attempt to reduce costs, but by that time the earlier issues of Weird Tales had been extensively mined for reprints by August Derleth's publishing venture, Arkham House, and as a result McIlwraith often reprinted lesser known stories. They were not advertised as reprints, which led in a couple of cases to letters from readers asking for more stories from H. P. Lovecraft, whom they believed to be a new author. thumb|Cover of the May 1952 issue, by Virgil Finlay|alt=A smiling woman surrounded by demonic figuresIn Weinberg's opinion, the magazine lost variety under McIlwraith's editorship, and "much of the uniqueness of the magazine was gone". The quality of Weird Tales artwork suffered when Delaney cut the rates. Bok, whose first cover had appeared in December 1939, moved to New York and joined the office art staff for a while; he eventually left because of the low pay. Boris Dolgov began contributing in the 1940s; he was a friend of Bok's and the two occasionally collaborated, signing the result "Dolbokgov". Weinberg regards Dolgov's illustration for Robert Bloch's "Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper" as one of his best works. Weird Tales paper was of very poor quality, which meant that the reproductions were poor, and along with the low pay rate for art this meant that many artists treated Weird Tales as a last resort for their work. The art editor, Lamont Buchanan, was able to establish five artists as regulars by the mid 1940s; they remained regular contributors until 1954, when the magazine's first incarnation ceased publication. The five were Dolgov, John Giunta, Fred Humiston, Vincent Napoli, and Lee Brown Coye. In Weinberg's review of Weird Tales interior art, he describes Humiston's work as ranging "from bad to terrible", but he is more positive about the others. Napoli had worked for Weird Tales from 1932 to the mid 1930s, when he began selling to the science fiction pulps, but his work for Short Stories brought him back to Weird Tales in the 1940s. Weinberg speaks highly of both Napoli and Coye, whom Weinberg describes as "the master of the weird and grotesque illustration". Coye did a series of full page illustrations for Weird Tales called "Weirdisms", which ran intermittently from November 1948 to July 1951. The letter column, "The Eyrie", was much reduced in size during McIlwraith's tenure, but as a gesture to the readers a "Weird Tales Club" was started. Joining the Club simply meant writing in to receive a free membership card; the only other benefit was that the magazine listed all the members' names and addresses, so that members could contact each other. Among the names listed in the January 1943 issue was that of Hugh Hefner, later to become famous as the founder of Playboy. Toward the end of McIlwraith's time as editor a couple of new writers appeared, including Richard Matheson and Joseph Payne Brennan.

The four issues edited by Sam Moskowitz in the early 1970s included a detailed biography of William Hope Hodgson, serialized over three issues, along with some rare stories of Hodgson's that Moskowitz had unearthed. Many of the other stories were reprints, either from Weird Tales or from other early pulps such as The Black Cat or Blue Book. In Ashley's opinion, the magazine "had the feel of a museum piece with nothing new or progressive", though Weinberg describes the magazine as having "an interesting jumble of contents". Ashley's opinion of the two Bellerophon issues is low: he describes them as lacking "any clear editorial direction or acumen". In 2010 VanderMeer became the magazine's editor in chief. During this time Weird Tales published works by a wide range of strange fiction authors including Michael Moorcock and Tanith Lee, as well as newer writers such as N. K. Jemisin, Jay Lake, Cat Rambo, and Rachel Swirsky. along with receiving two Hugo Award nominations in subsequent years

In addition to winning or being nominated for awards, under VanderMeer's editorship Weird Tales saw the number of subscriptions triple as the magazine "came to symbolise what was good about the changes in the SF community."

in 2011 Marvin Kaye and John Harlacher purchased Weird Tales from John Gregory Betancourt with Kaye taking over chief editorial duties from VanderMeer. Issue 359, the first under the new publishers, was published in late February 2012. Some months before the release of issue 359, a special World Fantasy Convention preview issue was given away for free to interested attendees. Kaye wrote an essay titled "A Thoroughly NONRACIST Novel" defending his decision to publish the excerpt. and Jim C. Hines saying he was "highly disturbed that the editor ever thought this was in any way a good idea, that he was so supportive of this novel that he was going out of his way to defend and support it up until the Internet landed on his head." The publisher subsequently overruled Kaye and announced that Weird Tales no longer had plans to run the excerpt. After the fall 2012 issue #360, Kaye only published two more issues of Weird Tales, issue #361 in the summer of 2013 and #362 in the spring of 2014. In 2019 Weird Tales returned with author Jonathan Maberry as the editorial director, with issue #363 being released at the end of that year. This issue featured the story "Up from Slavery" by Victor LaValle, which later won the Stoker Award for Best Long Fiction.

Weird Tales was one of the most important magazines in the fantasy field; in Ashley's view, it is "second only to Unknown in significance and influence". The magazine's "Golden Age" was under Wright, and de Camp argues that one of Wright's accomplishments was to create a "Weird Tales school of writing". Justin Everett and Jeffrey H. Shanks, the editors of a recent scholarly collection of literary criticism focused on the magazine, argue that "Weird Tales functioned as a nexus point in the development of speculative fiction from which emerged the modern genres of fantasy and horror". The magazine was, unusually for a pulp, included by the editors of the annual Year in Fiction anthologies, and was generally regarded with more respect than most of the pulps. This remained true long after the magazine's first run ended, as it became the main source of fantasy short stories for anthologists for several decades. Weinberg argues that the fantasy pulps, of which, in his opinion, Weird Tales was the most influential, helped to form the modern fantasy genre, and that Wright, "if he was not a perfect editor  was an extraordinary one, and one of the most influential figures in modern American fantasy fiction", adding that Weird Tales and its competitors "served as the bedrock upon which much of modern fantasy rests". Everett and Shanks agree, and regard Weird Tales as the venue where writers, editors and an engaged readership "elevated speculated fiction to new heights" with influence that "reverberates through modern popular culture". In Ashley's words, "somewhere in the imagination reservoir of all U. S. (and many non U. S.) genre fantasy and horror writers is part of the spirit of Weird Tales".