Weirdest of the weird

Weird Tales had a good long run for a pulp magazine. It was published from 1923 to 1954. Along the way it published some of the best authors since Edgar Allan Poe. Many of them became personal friends; they fed off each other, creating a coterie of writers nearly unparalled in modern fiction. Whole books of anthologies, dozens of them at least, have been published using Weird Tales as their source for material. The stories have also been anthologized on television and in movies. It is a rich literary vein to mine.

But you can't sell magazines unless people pick them up and look at them, so most of the covers were like other pulps, sexy and lurid. These covers from the 1930s, except for the "newest" one from 1941, are painted by Margaret Brundage, who used her own daughters for models. The robot cover is by an artist named Hannes Bok.

People must've hung onto their copies of Weird Tales, because they seem to be fairly well available. Pulp magazines in general sold in the millions every month, so there are still a lot of them out there. Collections might be expensive to amass, but not impossible. As far as I'm concerned, Weird Tales was the best of the best for this sort of fiction.

The word "weird" has changed over the years. Now it means anything unusual, but when Weird Tales was originally published it meant supernatural. Where else but from Postino are you gonna learn this kind of trivia?

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