A Video of the March 1948 WEIRD TALES

[Nicole Cushing]

We talk a lot about the influence of old pulp mags like vintage WEIRD TALES, but many people have never seen inside of one. I made a Youtube video going through the March '48 issue, cover to cover, to convey what the pulp reading experience was like. Lots of interesting fiction & poetry (Blackwood, Lovecraft, Bloch, Bradbury) and goofy advertisements.

Enjoy!

[Joel]

Many thanks, Nicole! Great to experience this quite rare issue even by proxy. I have some issues of the 1940s Weird Tales but the March 1948 issue is hard to come by. There's some great stuff in it, as you're already finding.

A few quick reactions:

Yes, the Bradbury story is unusually horrific for him – that may be why it didn't appear in a collection until the 1970s, by which time it had become a classic anthology piece.

Sorry the Bloch didn't work for you – I do like 'Catnip' and other darkly comic Bloch stories. Strictly speaking the ending is not a pun as there's no play on the sound of a word, rather on the way a phrase is used. Works for me but not for everyone.

Wakefield would not have been pleased to hear you describe 'Ghost Hunt' as standard pulp fare. He saw himself as the last true writer of the English ghost story, and therefore several levels above the peasants who hammered out pulp fiction. He was like that. Talented writer but completely arrogant. This particular story is OK but not one of his best, the ending (as always with him) is sharp and unsettling.

WT had a number of regular female contributors, most notably C.L. Moore and Mary Elizabeth Counselman. But they were certainly outnumbered. The 1930s WT seemed to be targeted more at a male readership, with the Margaret Brundage covers and so forth, but that changed somewhat in the 1940s under the editorship of Dorothy McIlwraith.

Happy reading!

[Nicole Cushing]

Quote Originally Posted by Joel

Sorry the Bloch didn't work for you – I do like 'Catnip' and other darkly comic Bloch stories. Strictly speaking the ending is not a pun as there's no play on the sound of a word, rather on the way a phrase is used. Works for me but not for everyone.

I'll grant you that comedy is an entirely subjective quality in fiction. For me, Bloch's attempts at humor come across as being too similar to the kind of jokes you'd find in the free comic strip in a piece of Bazooka Joe Bubble Gum -- by that I mean, irredeemably corny. Still, I know not everyone sees it that way.

And actually, I believe the word "pun" -- as defined by Merriam-Webster -- still accurately describes the last lines of the story.

Quote Originally Posted by Joel

Wakefield would not have been pleased to hear you describe 'Ghost Hunt' as standard pulp fare. He saw himself as the last true writer of the English ghost story, and therefore several levels above the peasants who hammered out pulp fiction. He was like that. Talented writer but completely arrogant. This particular story is OK but not one of his best, the ending (as always with him) is sharp and unsettling.

I found the ending predictable, and nothing truly unnerving or disturbing in the tale itself. (But then again, it takes a lot to really disturb me).

In fact, I found the ending to be the pulpiest part of it...radio commenter slowly unraveling under the influence of the paranormal a bit reminiscent of Lovecraftian protags going mad while writing the end of their accounts.

Quote Originally Posted by Joel

WT had a number of regular female contributors, most notably C.L. Moore and Mary Elizabeth Counselman. But they were certainly outnumbered. The 1930s WT seemed to be targeted more at a male readership, with the Margaret Brundage covers and so forth, but that changed somewhat in the 1940s under the editorship of Dorothy McIlwraith. Happy reading!

Thanks for mentioning this...good to see more women were involved than I had previously suspected!

[Gray House]

"The Professor's Teddy Bear" is excellent. That story, along with "And Now the News" are my favorites by Theodore Sturgeon that I've read.