The Centenary of 'Amazing Stories' (Part 2): A Guest Post by John Howard

  

 An Amazing Centenary 2: A New Sort of Magazine

The first issue of Amazing Stories appeared in early March 1926, with a cover date of April. Its publisher, who also exercised the final say in its contents, was Hugo Gernsback (1884-1967). Born in Luxembourg, Gernsback had emigrated to the United States and established himself as a pioneer entrepreneur in electronics and radio, promoting and growing his businesses by publishing his own technical magazines. Gernsback soon began to include ‘scientific’ fiction, and in August 1923 his magazine Science and Invention was a special ‘scientifiction’ issue.

I discovered the story of the rise, fall, and rebirth of Gernsback’s science fiction publishing empire in the first volume of Mike Ashley’s The History of the Science Fiction Magazine, where he also discussed in detail the precursors of Amazing Stories. Ashley covered the brief belle epoque when Gernsback was publisher of the only true sf magazines in the field – before the forced bankruptcy in 1929 when he lost control of all his businesses, including the magazines. Undeterred, Gernsback came back almost immediately as publisher of Science Wonder Stories and Air Wonder Stories. He soon combined them as Wonder Stories, now merely one among other sf magazines, including Amazing, that competed for their readers’ hard-earned cash.

I eventually came to own a few scattered issues of Amazing, mainly bought from dealers’ catalogues or from Fantasy Centre, that much-loved (and still missed) haven in the Holloway Road. There collectors could work their way along shelves containing hundreds of magazines, seeking those elusive missing issues, or, as I did, buy representative copies featuring favourite covers I’d seen reproduced in books, or which I simply found intriguing.

Under Hugo Gernsback all issues of Amazing featured cover paintings by Frank R. Paul (1884-1963), who also provided many of the interior illustrations. Paul’s architectural training showed. His artwork was visually striking and much more detailed than it might seem at first glance. Paul’s gigantic city vistas and towering buildings, mighty and ingenious machines, menacing (and sometimes rather whimsical) aliens were all shown against garish skies of solid red, yellow, or blue – intended to catch the eye and make the magazine stand out among all the hundreds of others ranked on the stands. And Amazing was printed in a larger size (often referred to as ‘bedsheet’) than the standard ‘pulp’, and on thick, heavy paper with trimmed edges. At the beginning it was not a true pulp: Gernsback always meant his Amazing Stories to be ‘different’ – and a cut above any other comparable magazines.

In November 2020 I had the chance to buy a long run of Amazing Stories, from the first issue to September 1939, bound in 24 hefty volumes. The boxes were wheeled into my hallway, and as soon as the van had driven away I fell to opening them and reverently extracting the bulky volumes, arranging them in order in tottering piles on the floor of my sitting-room. The binding had been professionally, and probably somewhat economically, done; but the volumes were complete and their contents secure. Most of the boards – a night-sky blue – were now warping slightly and the gold lettering on the spine of each was no longer bright. I had been able to afford the set because all covers, contents pages, and other front and end matter had been removed. No true collector would have wanted them. The fan (and I’ve no doubt it was a ‘he’) who had had his collection bound only kept the stories and editorials. A few pages with adverts and readers’ letters were preserved – but only if they had text from a story. In the front of each volume was a loose sheet of paper, which must have been laboriously typed out, neatly listing the contents issue by issue with page numbers.

Until last summer the volumes lay massed on the floor of my workroom in a sort of low rampart or even platform. When I finally bought some new bookcases I arranged the magazines, nearly five feet of them, in a row along the top. I reach up and pull Volume I from its place. This contains the first six issues of Amazing, April to September 1926. As I open it, the boards crackle and that unique, time-spanning smell of old magazines is released. It is not at all musty; it is a heady, stimulating perfume. The pages are browned and a few are faintly foxed but none seem brittle: I am always careful in turning them, but they would have to be deliberately handled roughly to seriously damage them. The first page has Amazing Stories printed in the same comet-tail logo style used on the cover, and subtitled ‘The Magazine of Scientifiction’. We are informed that the Editor is Hugo Gernsback F.R.S.; the Managing Editor is Dr T. O’Conor Sloane M.A., Ph.D. (He at least was a ‘proper’ scientist!) Beneath the names a heading claims ‘Extravagant Fiction Today - - - - - Cold Fact Tomorrow’. The rest of the page is taken up by Gernsback’s editorial “A New Sort of Magazine” – with his often-quoted definition of a genre.

 ‘Another fiction magazine? […] True. But this is not “another fiction magazine,” AMAZING STORIES is a new kind of fiction magazine! […] There is the usual fiction magazine, the love story and the sex-appeal type of magazine, the adventure type, and so on, but a magazine of “Scientifiction” is a pioneer in its field in America. By “scientifiction” I mean the Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and Edgar Allan Poe type of story – a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision. […] How good this magazine will be in the future is up to you. Read AMAZING STORIES – get your friends to read it and then write us what you think of it. We will welcome constructive criticism – for only in this way will we know how to satisfy you.’

 Were readers satisfied? It would seem so – at least, at this beginning. Certainly science fiction fandom was born. In his editorial “The Lure of Scientifiction” for the June issue, Gernsback remarked on ‘…the tremendous amount of mail we receive from – shall we call them “Scientifiction Fans”? – who seem to be pretty well orientated in this sort of literature. […] There is not a day, now, that passes, but we get from a dozen to fifty suggestions as to stories of which, frankly, we have no record, although we have a list of some 600 to 700 scientifiction stories. […]’

The stories, all reprints, selected for the first issue were: Off On a Comet by Jules Verne (the first of 2 parts); “The New Accelerator” by H.G. Wells; “The Man from the Atom” by G. Peyton Wertenbaker; “The Thing from – ‘Outside’” by George Allan England; “The Man Who Saved the Earth” by Austin Hall; and “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” by Edgar Allan Poe. Although missing here, the cover by Frank R. Paul is familiar from reproductions. I recall beaming ice-skaters enjoying themselves against a background of mountains of ice with ships frozen in place, all beneath an intense yellow sky almost overwhelmed by a gigantic Saturn floating close by.

I notice that from the outset Gernsback adopted the practice of running more than one serial in an issue, overlapping them. What Went Before – Now read on! When Off On a Comet and The Man from the Atom concluded in the May issue, Verne’s A Trip to the Center of the Earth began in three parts; and as that finished in July, a three-part serialisation of Station X by G. McLeod Winsor was started.

Although Verne and Wells dominated the reprints in the early issues, along with Poe, stories by other writers, often already well-known to fiction magazine readers, were also used. The June issue featured “The Runaway Skyscraper” by Murray Leinster, while the August issue began the serialisation of included the beginning of A Columbus of Space by the astronomer and novelist Garrett P. Serviss. Popular authors George Allan England and Austin Hall were also represented with stories in the first volume. It wasn’t until the third issue, June 1926, that a new story appeared. This was “The Coming of the Ice” by G. Peyton Wertenbaker, in the June issue. Mike Ashley reprinted the story in his book, where I had read it for the first time. “It is strange to be alone, and so cold. To be the last man on earth…”

At that moment there was a 16 year-old earning his first wages entranced by the early science fiction magazines, and especially Amazing Stories. It was not long before just a little of the awe and wonder was dispersed by ownership: but my fascination and interest has continued unabated. Decades later, the glamour remains. 

(John Howard)

 

The Centenary of 'Amazing Stories' (Part 1): A Guest Post by John Howard

 

 An Amazing Centenary 1: The Lure of Scientifiction

For me 1977 was a great time to up my game as a serious reader of science fiction. I was 16 that year and in the summer left school for my first job. I considered myself rich at £96 per month. I was living at home and had few expenses after I had paid my father for ‘board and lodging’. The remainder of the money I earned was my own to spend. And because in those days saving towards a pension never entered my mind, most of my free cash went on science fiction.

In retrospect, many factors seem to have come together around the same time. London was an hour away by train; I was used to ‘going up’ on Saturdays. Instead of wandering the streets around the West End or the South Kensington museums I would first head straight to my favourite recent discovery, Dark They Were and Golden-Eyed – a large bookshop up an alley in Soho devoted entirely to science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Those afternoons of browsing and buying banished the routine and mundane.

Crucially, too, as well as new paperback fiction and magazines, Dark They Were stocked books about sf. At the same time as having the chance to examine and buy sf in considerable quantity and variety, I was introduced to the history of the genre and the work of those who illustrated it. Numerous books of sf art and heavily-illustrated histories and surveys of the genre were being published in those days. I found Brian Aldiss’ Science Fiction Art (1975, slim but wide-ranging – and huge in height and breadth) and Fantastic Science-Fiction Art 1926-1954 (1975) by Lester del Rey. Both compilations concentrated on the cover art of sf magazines (although Aldiss’ included much interior artwork too). I bought the first volume of Mike Ashley’s The History of the Science Fiction Magazine, newly published in paperback (still extremely useful, and the thoroughly revised version from 2000 is surely definitive). I was swept into the world of the American pulp magazines, and especially Hugo Gernsback and his magazine Amazing Stories – the first issue of which appeared in early March 1926, dated April.

I had also found that Dark There Were kept a shelf or two of second-hand sf magazines, which I knew about from the books on sf art. On those shelves I found copies of The British Science Fiction Magazine (with its proclamation inside that the contents were ‘ALL BRITISH’). This was edited by ‘Vargo Statten’ and featured much work by him and ‘Volsted Gridban’. Because I had started to read about the history of sf at the same time as immersing myself in the product it wasn’t long before my incredulity concerning the child-naming policies of the parents of Messrs Statten and Gridban was vindicated by the knowledge that both were house names created by the publishers, and used by two other prolific contributors to the magazine. Vargo Statten was John Russell Fearn (1908-60), while Volsted Gridban was almost exclusively E.C. Tubb (1919-2010) – both also authors of many paperback novels which were extensively promoted in the magazine. I bought the February 1964 issue of the aristocratic large-size Analog which had an almost serene (considering what was happening in the story it illustrated) cover by John Schoenherr. And there was an issue of Amazing Stories from August 1939, which seemed an artifact out of deep time, although it was still less than 40 years old – something that a magazine from 1988 or so could never feel like, to me, now.

It was something else to see for myself the magazines I had only previously read about, to be able to make them my own, to open and read them – and sniff them! To inhale the smell of old sf magazines was to invoke, as it still does, a past time that stands comparison with M. Proust and his tea-soaked cake. Time can briefly be regained. Those magazines with their gaudy wonder-filled covers and interior illustrations smeared across their brittle pages gripped me with a nostalgia for something that I had never known or experienced – and which I now know will remain out of reach, except during exceptional, almost sacramental moments. Those old pages (always growing older) continue to induce a homesickness, a form of Sehnsucht, for those times of my own when all this was new, unsullied, to be experienced for the first time.

After I had visited Dark They Were I would often stroll on to Soho Square and, if the weather permitted, sit on a bench in the gardens and browse through my purchases and perhaps read a story from one of the collections or anthologies. I don’t recall that I ever inhaled ‘pulp’ in public!

It was later the same autumn that I discovered the Vintage Magazine Shop – I’m sure that was its name as well as its business. It was just off Cambridge Circus, not very far from Soho Square. There were now two sources of old sf magazines. My recollection is of magazines of all kinds and ages piled haphazardly on tables and the floor – you just had to sort through them to find what you wanted. There was an upstairs room too. I found a couple of issues of Science Fantasy from the early 1950s, and excavated issues of the British Reprint Editions of Amazing Stories, Dynamic Science Fiction, Fantastic Adventures, and Thrilling Wonder Stories from the same era. There was the May 1933 issue of Wonder Stories which included stories by two writers I was already reading, Clark Ashton Smith and John Beynon Harris – who I knew had re-invented himself as John Wyndham. And from somewhere in the shop a proper American issue of Amazing, one from the period of a few months in 1933 when the magazine had a new Art Deco logo and featured modernistic poster-like covers by ‘Sigmond’. (I no longer have that copy, which I have since identified as the February issue.) Then one afternoon the door wouldn’t open. I stepped back and realised the shop was closed. Gazing through the dusty window I saw that the place was empty. It had been stripped bare. 

(John Howard)