R A W. Lowndes - Magazine Of Horror

[dem]

Robert A. W. Lowndes brilliant homage to Weird Tales, Strange Tales & Co., ran for 36 issues between August 1963 and April 1971. Printed on cheap pulp paper (more out of economic necessity than homage, you suspect), it even looks and feels like the real thing. Because of the leaning toward obscure 'twenties and 'thirties, I've come to think of it as a kind of Not At Night Companion, mopping up several of the titles Christine Campbell Thomson missed!

The following is little more than a stub, an index to every issue with covers where possible and some notes, but I'm hoping it will finally mutate into something more substantial.

All issues were edited by Robert A. W. Lowndes.

Magazine Of Horror #1 (Health Knowledge Inc., August, 1963)

Frank Belknap Long - The Man With A Thousand Legs
Wallace West - A Thing Of Beauty
Robert W. Chambers - The Yellow Sign
Edward D. Hoch - The Maze And The Monster
Ambrose Bierce - The Death Of Halpin Frayser
Donald A. Wollheim - Babylon: 70 M
H. G. Wells - The Inexperienced Ghost
Robert Silverberg - The Unbeliever
W. J. Stamper - Fidel Basin
Frank Lillie Pollock - The Last Dawn
Mark Twain - The Undying Head


Frank Belknap Long - The Man With A Thousand Legs: (Weird Tales, August 1927). Arthur St. Armand, youthful mad scientist, experiments with etheric vibrations (whatever they are) transforms him into a blood-drinking half man - half squid trailing streams of noxious golden slime. The many tentacled monstrosity commits several gruesome murders - notably those of a child and a heroic diver he takes apart piece by piece - before heading out to sea. The part that is still Armand pleads with a lighthouse keeper for help but, rejected, takes out a cutter, killing a hundred men in the process before meeting its doom. Utterly bonkers and a true horror pulp classic.

Frank Lillie Pollock - The Last Dawn: New York. Eastwood and his team at Columbia University Observatory keep vigil for the imminent new star which, provided it shows, will prove Prof. Bernier's theory that the universe is finite. At last it appears, two weeks late. "Oh, ace!" thinks Eastwood, "this will be great!" The new star promptly sets the planet ablaze killing everyone. Eastwood and assistant Alice are the last to go and she decides that now is as good a time as any to have her first bunk up so at least they go out on a happy note.

Magazine Of Horror #2 (Health Knowledge Inc., Nov., 1963)

Frank Belknap Long - The Space Eaters
Edward D. Hoch - The Faceless Thing
H. G. Wells - The Red Room
Dean Lipton - Hungary's Female Vampire
Ambrose Bierce - A Tough Tussle
Donald A. Wollheim - Doorslammer
George Waight - The Electric Chair
Jerryl L. Keane - The Other One
Archie Binns - The Charmer
Robert A. W. Lowndes - Clarissa
Rudyard Kipling - The Strange Ride Of Morrowbie Jukes


Magazine Of Horror #3 (Health Knowledge Inc., Feb., 1964)

David H. Keller - The Seeds Of Death
Janet Hirsch - The Seeking Thing
H. G. Wells - A Vision Of Judgement
Arthur J. Burks - The Place Of The Pythons
Ambrose Bierce - One Summer Night
S. Baring-Gould - Jean Bouchon
Rachel Cosgrave Payes - The Door
Mary Wilkins-Freeman - Luella Miller
H. S. W. Chibbett - They That Wait
Robert W. Chambers - The Repairer Of Reputations


David H. Keller - The Seeds Of Death: The Duke of Mercia, down on his luck, agrees to investigate a series of disappearances around the Andoran castle of Lady Helen. A demon flower tale which makes fine use of Gothic paraphernalia and also scores by having the bad guy - or girl - come out on top.

Janet Hirsch - The Seeking Thing: Driving along a country road, Paul Allenby hits a crumpled shape. Fearing the worst he gets out of the car and is relieved to discover that it was only a battered up burlap bag. As he pulls away, it attaches itself to the bottom of his vehicle and when he arrives home Allenby notices a wide, ugly scratch extending from fingertip to wrist. By the following day this has become a bloodless brown stain fast climbing his arm and giving off a putrid stench. What is he turning into?

Arthur J. Burks - Place Of The Pythons: Effective jungle tale of witchcraft in the Philippines. "And you shall go down to the place of the pythons for your sins!" declares the wispy-haired hag, and the narrator, a petty criminal, is transformed into a were-snake. "The place was crowded with natives and they were talking, madly, all at once, of a great python which had been seen the night before. The monstrous creature, they said, was twenty feet long, and he had entered the Negrito village, to which the natives had returned the day just previous, and had killed the chief terribly. From there he had come to the tindahan, and everyone had fled, save only a white man too drunk to move. In all the country about, I was the only white man! ... My mind groped for an answer for I knew I had not been drunk. Besides, the wispy haired keeper of the tindahan was leering at me, and her baleful old eyes were alight with dreadful knowledge. I saw where they were peering ... "

Rachel Cosgrave Payes - The Door: The locals are baffled when the silent workmen erect a doorway "in the middle of nothing." John, the first person to pick it's burglar-proof lock, steps through it ...

Sabine Baring-Gould - Jean Bouchon: The spectre of a French waiter who helped himself to the tips. When his grave is disturbed the coffin is discovered to be filled with coins. These are spent on commissioning an extremely flattering statue to the pilfering Bouchon. Certainly doesn't qualify as "horror", but an effective gentle ghost story.

Ambrose Bierce - One Summer Night: Henry Armstrong is a victim of premature burial. Lucky for him, within hours of being planted in the soil, two medical students hire big negro Jess the cemetery caretaker to dig him up to furnish their dissecting table. On second thoughts, maybe "lucky" isn't the right word ...

Magazine Of Horror #4 (Health Knowledge Inc., May, 1964)


H. P. Lovecraft - The Dream In The Witch-House
Rudyard Kipling - The Mark Of The Beast
H. G. Wells - The Truth About Pyecraft
Fitz-James O'Brien - What Was It?
Anna Hunger - Beyond The Breakers
Attila Hatvany - A Dream Of Falling
Tigrina - Last Act: October



Fitz-James O'Brien - What Was it?: A house on 22nd Street, New York. Following a night of opium and conversation about the supernatural, Harry is attacked in his bed by an invisible being. After an exhausting struggle he eventually overpowers the unseen assailant and, with the assistance of friend Hammond, subdues it with binds. They have no idea what to do with "the enigma" as to hold it prisoner in the house is impossible but letting it loose on the world is unthinkable. Fortunately the being dies through lack of sustenance, having refused all food proffered it by its worried captives. They give it a quick plaster-casting and bury it in the garden.

Tigrina - Last Act: October: Original to Magazine Of Horror. Young Meg Clayton was burnt as a witch by the Bloomsbury Villagers. Before she died, she placed a curse on them and all generations of their families to come - "October shall bode ill for you and yours".

Jump to the present day and Miss Simpson's Residence for Refined Gentlewomen where spinster Hortense Pilkington - the last descendant of the 'witch-finder - has just agreed to mind the Cranston child on All Hallows Eve. Being aware of the curse and conscious of how many of her family have died during October down the years, she takes every precaution to ensure her safety until one minute past midnight when she'll be out of danger for another year ...

Magazine Of Horror #5 (Health Knowledge Inc., Sept, 1964)

Merle Prout - House Of The Worm
Rev. Henry S. Whitehead - Cassius
Henry James - The Ghostly Rental
Doald A. Wollheim - Bones
J. Vernon Shea - Five Year Contract
Walt Liebscher - The Morning The Birds Forgot To Sing
H. G. Wells - The Beautiful Suit
Stephen Dentinger - A Stranger Came To Reap


Donald A Wollheim - Bones: A mummy is resurrected, but Dr. Zweig - obviously a colleague of Robert Lory's Damien Harmon - has overlooked a slightly glaring, decidedly fatal probability ...

Magazine Of Horror #6 (Health Knowledge Inc., Nov, 1964)

Lawrence Manning - Caverns Of Horror
Clark Ashton Smith - The Door To Saturn
August Derleth - The Pacer
Robert Chambers - The Mask
H. G. Wells - The Moth
Walt Liebscher - Prodigy
David Grinnell - The Feminine Fraction
Nathaniel Hawthorne - Dr. Heidegger's Experiment


Magazine Of Horror #7 (Health Knowledge, Jan. 1965)

George Allan England - The Thing From - Outside
Joseph Payne Brennan - Black Thing At Midnight
Mary Wilkins-Freeman - The Shadow On The Wall
Seabury Quinn - The Phantom Farmhouse
Edgar Allen Poe - The Oblong Box
Ed M. Clinton - A Way With Kids
H. B. Marriott-Watson - The Devil Of The Marsh
H. P. Lovecraft & August Derleth - The Shuttered Room

Joseph Payne Brennan - Black Thing At Midnight: The hideously mutilated animated corpse of beachcomber old man Fallon returns to the empty Seabreeze Manor, and destroys hapless Jenkins the Janitor.

H. B. Marriott-Watson - The Devil of the Marsh: Victorian creepiness. The narrator keeps his late night tryst with the beautiful lady of the marsh. Through the mist, he glimpses his predecessor, a skeletal, toad-like thing that once was a man before she drained the life from him. But still he wants her. It is only after he's watched his beloved gloatingly drown the wretch in the swamp that he comes to his senses.

Magazine Of Horror #8 (Health Knowledge Inc., April, 1965)

William J. Makin - The Black Laugh
Rev. R. H. D. Barham - The Hand Of Glory (verse)
David Grinnell - The Garrison
Robert W. Chambers - Passeur
John Brunner - Orpheus's Brother
Robert W. Chambers - Cassilda's Song
Washington Irving - The Lady Of The Velvet Collar
Reynold Junker - Jack
Oliver Taylor - The Burglar Proof Vault
Ray Cummings - The Dead Who Walk


Magazine Of Horror #9 (Health Knowledge Inc., June, 1965)

H. F. Arnold - The Night Wire
Wallace West - Sacrilege
Jerome Clark - All The Stains Of Long Delight
Robert E. Howard - Skulls In The Stars
Richard Marsh - The Photographs
Francis Flagg - The Distortion Out Of Space
William H. Danner - Guarantee Period
H. G. Wells - The Door In The Wall
Alphonse Daudet - The Three Low Masses
William Hope Hodgson - The Whistling Room


H. F. Arnold - The Night Wire: (Weird Tales, Sept. 1926). As narrator Jim and John Morgan man the typewriters, news comes in over the wire of a mysterious fog shrouding the town of Xebico. It seems to emanate from the local churchyard. Soon the swirling, vaguely human shapes are cannibalising the population. But where the Hell is this Xebico?

According to August Derleth, the most popular story Weird Tales ever ran.

'Francis Flagg' (George Henry Weiss) - The Distortion Out Of Space: (Weird Tales, August 1934). "Lost in a thirty foot room, Jim myself, and a woman unable to locate one another - it was impossible, incredible". A meteorite strikes the Simpson ranch in the Bear Mountains, obliterating an upper bedroom and leaving in its place a grey void that stretches for infinity. And somewhere in the nothingness, a terrified Mrs. Simpson gropes hopelessly for a way out. Our narrator and his friend Jim Blake, the local physician, bravely head off in search. Can they reach her and, crucially, find their way back out again before thirst and starvation kick in? Much depends on how kindly the saucer-eyed, tentacled, hairy spider-like extraterrestrial behind the distortion takes to being shot by a puny human.

Robert E. Howard - Skulls In The Stars: (Weird Tales, Jan. 1929). As he travels across the mist-shrouded, swampy fens, Solomon Kane is beset by a terrifying, red eyed figure with a terrible laugh. This spectre has already been responsible for the deaths of several men, and Kane is all but shredded by the thing's claws.

When the Puritan learns of the reason for the haunting, he dispenses his usual impartial, brutal justice to the miscreant responsible.

Magazine Of Horror #10 (Health Knowledge Inc., August, 1965)

Pauline Kappel Prilucik - The Girl At Heddons
Villiers de L'Isle-Adam - The Torture Of Hope
Seabury Quinn - The Cloth Of Madness
Gerald W. Page - The Tree
Robert W. Chambers - In The Court Of The Dragon
Kirk Mashburn - Placide's Wife
Joanna Russ - Come Closer
A. Hyatt-Verrill - The Plague Of The Living Dead


A. Hyatt Verrill - The Plague Of The Living Dead: (Amazing Stories, April, 1927). Dr. Farnham, unfairly ridiculed by polite society over his experiments to discover a serum that will indefinitely prolong human life, leaves America for the island of Abilone where he can get on with his work in peace. With three derelicts as his assistants and a menagerie to decimate, he's soon triumphed over death to the point where a rabbit he decapitates carries on with its business until Farnham sews its head back on its body. When the Sugar Loaf volcano erupts, his lab is destroyed but at least he has plenty of lovely human corpses to play with. Unfortunately, once revived, the dead turn on the living, a mad, cannibalistic, head-hunting mob who can't be destroyed! And so ugly! Even though several have lost a limb or three, the missing heads, hands and what-have-you fuse together on contact. Farnham must now find a way to rid the world of these savage, mindless mutants before they can take over the world!

Gerald W. Page - The Tree: Struck by a meteorite, the tree becomes a form of energy vampire, draining its victims whose deaths are officially recorded as heart failures. When the locals pour gasoline over it and burn it to a stump, the alien entity moves underground and heads toward town and richer pickings ...

Kirk Mashburn - Placide's Wife: The tight-fisted, stupid Placide kills his gipsy wife Nita when he suspects her of having an affair with a mysterious peddler and discovers - via a blackened crucifix with mutilated saviour placed under his bed - that he's had a curse placed upon him. He hurls the crucifix at her corpse and it embeds in her neck. Before he and his equally dense friend Lebaudy can bury her, a cat settles on her breast and licks the blood away from her throat - and Nita returns as a werewolf! The peddler who caused all the trouble is a vampire and he and Nita bring terror to the Cajuns before his accidental staking by Lebaudy. Nita avenges herself on her husband - who, once savaged by his were-wife is impaled by the sexton to round off a really bad day - and survives to feature in a sequel.

Villiers de L'Isle-Adam - The Torture Of Hope: Segovia. Having endured the torture chamber for a year and still not renounced his faith, Rabbi Aser Abarbanel is to be burned alive at tomorrow's auto de fe. No sooner has the Grand Inquisitor broken this cheering news and left his cell however, than the Rabbi realises his tormentor has forgotten to lock the door behind him ...

Joanna Russ - Come Closer: Fifteen years ago, old Millie Cox left the gas tap on killing herself, her husband and their backward son who had recently been abused by "some men". Now another child has gone missing, and a member of the search party learns the awful truth when she pays a visit to the supposedly derelict Cox farmhouse.

Magazine Of Horror #11 (Health Knowledge Inc., November, 1965)

Cover: Carl Kidwell

Edward D. Hoch - The Empty Zoo
Ambrose Bierce - A Psychological Shipwreck
Laurence Manning - The Call Of The Mech-Men
Guy De Maupassant - Was It A Dream?
Katherine Yates - Under The Hau Tree
Robert E. Howard - Rattle Of Bones
Dorothy Norman Cooke - The Head Of Du Bois
Robert E. Howard - The Dweller In The Dark Valley (verse)
Greye La Spina - The Devil's Pool


Greye La Spina - The Devil's Pool: Excellent, suspenseful werewolf novella. Horrific events in and around Baumman's Farm after the arrival of the saturnine Lem Schwartz who enchants a pool in the forest so that all who immerse themselves become werewolves on the night of the next full moon. Seline and Harry have already fallen under this dreadful spell when Mason Hardy sets out to investigate the disappearance of a local cab-driver's baby. In a particularly grisly sequence, Hardy discovers the leftovers of the wolves' most recent meal ...

Edward D. Hoch - The Empty Zoo: Having spent ten years in prison for attacking a little girl, Tommy returns to the Zoo where the incident took place. Unbeknown to him, his latest girlfriend is his victim matured to adulthood. He spends another lengthy stretch behind bars.

Dorothy Norman Cooke - The Head Of Du Bois: Voodoo. Author decapitated in the jungle by natives learns of the success of his posthumously published novel. The critic reviewing it suffers nightmare glimpses of Du Bois's fate. Would have benefited from a nasty ending.

Andrew Brosnatch (Weird Tales, Nov. 1925)

Katherine Yates - Under The Hau Tree: (Weird Tales, Nov. 1925). Joseph and Jennie promised each other a world tour to celebrate their marriage. They're not going to let the trifling business of being mangled in a train wreck stand in their way.

Magazine Of Horror #12 (Health Knowledge Inc., Winter, 1965/66)

Robert Bloch - The Faceless God
Seabury Quinn - Master Nicholas
Roger Zelazny - But Not The Herald
Gordon MacCreagh - Dr. Muncing, Exorcist
John Steinbeck - The Affair At 7 Rue de M------
Irwin Ross - The Man In The Dark
Robert A. W. Lowndes - The Abyss
Robert E. Howard - Destination (verse)
Muriel E. Eddy - Memories Of HPL (article)
Henry S. Whitehead - The Black Beast


Two excellent scoops in this one. Muriel C. Eddy's poignant memories of Lovecraft and her husband Clifford (author of the notorious The Loved Dead), and the first professional publication of the Seeb's Master Nicholas. Peter Haining revived Dr. Muncing, Exorcist for his Black Magic Omnibus: Vol 2.

[Johnlprobert]

Love the name of that publisher!

[Calenture]

Not sure if I moved my synopsis of The King in Yellow from the old place, but here's The Repairer of Reputations by Robert W Chambers:

The opening story from The King in Yellow depicts future America (1920 - this story was first published in 1895) as a place of revolutions and suicide parlours. Hildred Castaigne has been released from an insane asylum, firm in the belief that the fall from his horse which affected his brain has in fact affected it only for the better, completely altering his character from that of a careless playboy to an energetic and ambitious schemer.

During his convalescence he had bought and read The King in Yellow, that book being a recurring motif like the Necronomicon in Lovecraft's stories - a book which brings madness upon the reader.

Most of Castaigne's time is spent in the company of the deranged and deformed Mr Wilde - the title's Repairer. Both Wilde and Castaigne are part of a secret revolution to take over the country in the name of The King in Yellow.

A surprisingly readable story, Wilde's frequent encounters with his vicious cat - which he keeps apparently just to tease and fight with - are unforgettable.

By the way, I know that Bierce's One Summer Night - an early example of flash fiction, covering barely a page - is available as a free download... if I could just find it.

[justin]

A recent visit to a market stall resulted in me bagging about 20 copies of the Magazine of Horror, all of which pretty much look unread. Doing my best not to cackle manically as I pocketed change from a fiver I spirited the collection away and spun the following article for a future issue of The Paperback Fanatic. Here it is.....

Although I most readily associate the company name ACME as being the chief supplier of giant anvils and rockets to the hapless Wil E Coyote in his fruitless pursuit of Road Runner, the company name ACME also appeared on the front cover of a number of US pulp magazines in the 1960s, specifically The Magazine of Horror, Thrilling Western Stories, Startling Mystery Stories, Famous Science Fiction and World-Wide Adventure. It’s the Magazine of Horror that I wish to focus on in this review, but first I feel I should at least offer an explanation and reassurance that I still am a paperback fanatic, and this publication is not about to change its name to The Magazine Fanatic!
I see The Magazine of Horror as a direct link between the pulps of the 1930s and the paperback explosion of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Indeed, when MoH first appeared in 1963, there were no mass-market horror pulps other than Pan’s yearly anthology in the UK, with only Arkham House producing regular collections of the likes of Lovecraft and Ashton Smith which were outside the budget and below the radar of the general public. When MoH’s mother company collapsed in 1971, horror was entering a boom period thanks to the success of films such as Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist, and the growing interest in the more salacious elements of the occult as promoted by the hippy movement. Robert A Lowdnes had kept the torch burning during the lean years through his inventive magazines, and in a cruel twist worthy of the pulp fiction he treasured, had the flame cruelly snuffed out just as the genre was resurgent.
Each issue was a labour of love, although obviously put together on a hand-to-mouth budget based on its use of public domain stories from the pulps, there was sufficient care and attention invested into the mag to ensure it was an essential read. Each issue carried around five stories, typically self contained shorts as the magazine’s variable schedule (monthly then quarterly then bi-monthly) and patchy distribution rendered serials a commercial no-no as readers wouldn’t know if or when they would pick up the next issue. Lowdnes, who was fondly known as Doc, would have been approaching 50 years old when the first issue of MoH appeared and evidently had utilised every single contact and knowledge he had gleaned during his time as a leading fan and editor of SF pulps and book lines. Lowdnes was scouring his extensive files of pulps and hand-selecting the very best to re-present to a modern audience who lapped it up. Although the authors featured in MoH (and its sister publication Startling Mystery Stories) seem rather obvious choices now, at the time the likes of Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith weren’t widely in print, the occult detective adventures of Jules de Grandin by Seabury Quinn were but a fond memory, and Robert E Howard’s puritan adventurer Solomon Kane was an absolute revelation even to those who knew of Conan.
ACME was an imprint of Health Knowledge Inc, a New York based company who mainly specialised in distributing saucy magazines as well as producing a number of budget-titles to piggy-back on popular trends. (MoH carried adverts for other Health Knowledge volumes such as The Complete Prophecies of Nostradamus and The Exquisite Figure Guide) Since the collapse of the pulps Lowdnes had taken refuge in their offices, editing a pair of non-fiction titles dedicated to ‘sex education’ (Real Life Guide to Sexual and Marital Knowledge featured articles such as “Circumcision- pro and con” and “Youth seeks reasonable answer- premarital intercourse- yes or no?”) and the occult. When owner Louis Elson noted how well the Pan horror series was selling (presumably they were importing them for the US market), he tasked Lowdnes with producing a magazine equivalent, and MoH was born.
132 pages of A5 bound with staples and in colour covers, the early issues looked absolutely terrible mainly due to Lowdnes evidently being unable to afford a decent cover artist and utilising an amateurish logo dripping with blood. After issue 12, which ironically boasted the best cover of the run, a flame tinged illustration by Gray Morrow of Robert Bloch’s The Faceless God, Lowdnes settled on recycling pen work from the very same pulps he was excavating the contents from, typically black and white pen work from the likes of Virgil Finlay, which he placed on solid colour backgrounds. This gave the mags an instantly recognisable identity. Internal pages were type-set with the occasional budget-friendly illustration snatched from a pulp, but these were few and far between. Due to the number of pages and the staple binding it’s difficult to track these mags down in decent condition, as typically the covers have torn way and creased.
Lovecraft and his disciples formed the background of the MoH, although Lowdnes was careful in his choice of material, always avoiding stories which were being republished by Arkham House or available in the few mass market horror anthologies shuffling around at the time. In addition to classics such as The Dreams in the Witch House and The Shuttered Room, a non-fiction piece Memories of HPL was published as well as additions to the Lovecraft mythos from the likes of Stefan Alletti and Lowdnes himself. The Horror out of Lovecraft, an amusing spoof from Ace Books SF editor Donald Wollheim finished with the line “As I opened the door, there on the bedspread, revealed by the sudden flash of the electric light, lay the still quivering toe of Eliphas Snodgrass!” Although Lovecraft’s style has been the subject of much pastiche since, this was a new approach and did not elicit many laughs from humourless Lovecraftians according to the letters page in the next issue. One fascinating piece accompanying Robert Bloch’s Satan’s Servants included a fascinating foreword with the feedback provided to a young Bloch by Lovecraft which ultimately resulted in Bloch’s first professional sale. And it’s this that epitomised Lowdnes approach in that he typically included a preface to each story which further enriched the readers enjoyment by offering some nuggets as to the writer’s motivations, or the editor he was attempting to please.
Clark Ashton Smith’s work is also heavily represented, tales such as Door to Saturn, The Monster of the Prophecy and the Colossus of Ylourgne, all the subject of heated debate in the always feisty and opinionated letters page. Lowdnes would ask readers to vote on their favourite stories in each issue which would help shape future selections, with Smith’s baroque tales often splitting the correspondence. As did the Jules de Grandin ghost-hunter pulps of Seabury Quinn, who nonetheless went onto become the most published author in MoH and its companion mags. The Devil’s Bride, the only full length novel from Quinn and his hero was serialised over three issues when the mag settled down to a bi-monthly schedule, the mag’s only serial so Lowdnes must have been confident in their popularity. With the exception of a collection of US paperback reprints in the early 1970s, MoH may offer one of the few opportunities to enjoy Quinn’s stories at decent price. A number of rarer Robert E Howard stories saw print, including my favourite Worms of the Earth and a Conan tale, both of which surprisingly received criticism as below par Howard compared to the likes of Skulls in the Stars. Other pulp demi-Gods starring in the pages of MoH were Frank Belknapp Long, Hugh Cave and James Blish. Lowdnes was also a great champion of David Keller, publishing a series of his rather bizarre ‘Cornwall’ fairy tales, although I can’t help but think Keller was a pseudonym for Lowdnes, as one of Keller’s short stories was later credited to Lowdnes when it appeared in a Kurt Singer anthology. (It’s been pointed out at the Vault of Evil web-site that Singer and Lowdnes must have had some sort of arrangement based on the number of Moh reprints that were also later reprinted in Singer’s many anthologies. Either that, or Singer was lazy and ripped off Lowdnes!)
Occasionally Lowdnes scraped enough money together to fund a new story or two, although the most notable appeared in Startling Mystery Stories, the companion mag Lowdnes also edited. The Cleaning Machine from Paul F Wilson, The Scar by Ramsey Campbell and The Glass Floor and Reaper’s Image from Stephen King, all denoted the professional debut of the authors to the best of my knowledge. As the mag’s personality and quality ensured a dedicated readership, Lowdnes added a further pulp mag featuring the Weird tales gang to the group- Weird Terror Tales which after three issues mutated into Bizarre Fantasy Tales. Unfortunately, financial disaster was looming for the publishing and distribution group which would spell the end for all of the magazines.
A burgeoning new counter-culture mag by the name of Rolling Stone had approached Health Knowledge with a view to appointing them as their new distributor, a lucrative agreement on the surface of it due to the counter-culture and rock music celebrated in the pages of Rolling Stone spilling over into the mainstream. However, when only a short time later Rolling Stone decided to take their business to a new distributor who had offered them a better deal, Health Knowledge were left with an unsustainable infrastructure of staff and technology. They had borrowed heavily to put in place state of the art processes to support the Rolling Stone deal, but without that income they were unable to service their debts and the company collapsed. 1971 saw the demise of the MoH and its sister publications.
Lowdnes personality and attention to detail still make the Health Knowledge mags and MoH in particular as readable today as I’m sure they were then, and much of the material has still never made it into mass-market paperback. For me the magazine’s unashamedly pulpy roots act as a welcome antidote to the more cerebral (and dare I say pretentious) direction modern horror anthologies are taking. It’s sad that Lowdnes excellent mags were cut off in their prime, just as a new era of popularity in horror fiction was emerging. However, if Lowdnes and crew are to be considered as torch-bearers for the genre during a barren decade, they would hopefully be pleased to know that their Herculean task had been successful.

Magazine of Horror, 36 issues, 1963 to 1971
Startling Mystery Tales, 18 issues, 1966 to 1971
Weird Terror Tales, 3 issues, 1969-1970
Bizarre Fantasy Tales, 2 issues, 1970-1971

[dem]

Thanks for sharing that, Justin! Lowdnes was as good an editor in his own right as the earlier pulpsters he so admired and his magazines are a treasure. You'd hope he had a deal going with Singer and received a decent cut from Horror Omnibus and Tales Of The Uncanny as there's no way he wouldn't have been made aware that so much of the MOH and SMS resurfaced in book form shortly after he'd exhumed it. His name really should have been on the cover.

The ads are gigglesome, too. I'm sure there was one for a "lifelike" blow-up doll if I could only find it, but here's my favourite of the Sexual & Marital Knowledge plugs - don't that guy look happy!

One note of caution: David H. Keller was an entirely separate flesh and blood entity from RAWL and is still very well regarded in weird fiction circles for his SF, horror and psychological terror tales!

Here - to the best of my ability - are the indexes for Startling Mystery Stories and Weird Terror Tales.

[dem]

Magazine Of Horror #13 (Health Knowledge Inc., Summer, 1966)

H. F. Scotten - The Thing In The House
Roger Zelazny - Divine Madness
Robert E. Howard - Valley Of The Lost
David H. Keller - Heredity
Anna Hunger - Dwelling Of The Righteous
Austin Hall - Almost Immortal


Magazine Of Horror #14 (Health Knowledge Inc., Winter, 1966/7)

August Derleth & Mark Scherer- The Lair Of The Star Spawn
Mary Wilkins-Freeman - The Vacant Lot
S. Fowler-Wright - Proof
Roger Zelazny - Come Now The Power
Laurence Manning - The Moth Message
Daniel Defoe - The Friendly Demon
Emil Petaja - Dark Hollow
Ambrose Bierce - An Inhabitant Of Carcosa
Edmond Hamilton - The Monster-God Of Mamurth


Magazine Of Horror #15 (Health Knowledge Inc., Spring, 1967)

Arthur J. Burks - The Room Of Shadows
Robert A. W. Lowndes - Lilies
J. Vernon Shea - The Flaw
Robert Barr - The Doom Of London (introduced by Sam Moskowicz)
Robert E. Howard - The Vale Of Lost Women
Hugh B. Cave - The Ghoul Gallery


Arthur J. Burks - Room Of Shadows: This one is as insane and wonderfully entertaining as Bassett Morgan at his brain-transplant best. Weird goings on at an exclusive New York hotel, home to Lun Yukra, a Eurasian vampire and pimp. The girls he systematically vampirises are transformed into dogs and forced to do his bidding. Enter Eda, searching for her prostitute sister, and Adam Clerc, an explorer, whose paths entwine after Eda - mesmerised by Yukra - enters Clerc's room in the form of a black cloud and sucks his blood. The two combine to take on the undead with bizarre and grisly results.

Magazine Of Horror #16 (Health Knowledge Inc., Summer, 1967)

Maurice Level - Night And Silence
Leonid Andreyeff - Lazarus
Joseph Payne Brennan - Mr. Octbur
Charles Willard Diffin - The Dog That Laughed
Pauline Kappel Prilucik - Ah, Sweet Youth
R. A. Lafferty - The Man Who Never Was
Sabine Baring-Gould - The Leaden Ring
Clark Ashton Smith - The Monster Of The Prophecy
Robert E. Howard - A Song For Men That Laugh (verse)


Sabine Baring-Gould - The Leaden Ring: The comeuppance of Julia Demant, eighteen-year-old heart-breaker who has already destroyed two young men by leading them on only to contemptuously reject their marriage proposals. As a result, suitor number one "married beneath himself" on the rebound and young James Hattersley blew his brains out. Old Aunt Elizabeth is scandalised by Julia's indifference to the tragedy, her insistence on attending the ball to seek out victim number three, and launches into a tract about "the young lady of the present day" with whom she has no patience. One Baring-Gould has got this rant out of his system (he's usually good for at least one per story: check out A Dead Finger for his views on the evils of Socialism and poor people), he treats us to a decent enough malevolent ghost story where-in Julia repeatedly experiences the sensation of putting a bullet through your head and dead James comes to claim her as his wife.

Magazine Of Horror #17 (Health Knowledge, Fall 1967)

Robert Edmond Alter - A Sense Of Crawling
Wallace West - The Laughing Duke
Robert E. Howard - Dermod's Bane
Frank Aubrey - The Spell Of The Sword [introduced by Sam Moskowicz]
Henry S. Whitehead - 'Williamson'
Victor Rousseau - The Curse Of Amen-Ra

Magazine Of Horror #18 (Health Knowledge Inc., Nov, 1967)

Thanks to Gaspard du Nord for scan


John Martin Leahy - In Amundsen's Tent
Jim Haught - Transient And Immortal
Robert E. Howard - Out Of The Deep
Thomas Boyd - The Bibliophilic
R. A. Lafferty - The Ultimate Creature
Jack Williamson - Wolves Of Darkness


John Martin Leahy - In Amundsen's Tent: (Weird Tales, Jan. 1928). North Pole, 1912. The three man expedition led by Sutherland comes off even worse than Captain Scott's. Not only have the rival parties reached the Pole before them, but they've got some very hostile company - beings from another world who drive men insane on sight of them. Sutherland and Travers go missing in the night, leaving Drumgold to record their final moments in his journal. It is later found by yet another expedition - in the same tent as Drumgold's head which has been staked out on a pole!

Magazine Of Horror #19 (Health Knowledge, Jan 1968)

Nictzin Dyalhis - The Red Witch
Larry Eugene Meredith - The Last Letter From Norman Underwood
Harriet Bennett - The Jewels Of Vishnu [introduced by Sam Moskowicz]
Holloway Horn - The Man From Cincinatti
Anna Hunger - Ground Afire
Mary Wilkins Freeman - The Wind In The Rosebush
Kirk Mashburn - The Last Of Placide's Wife
Robert E. Howard - The Years Are As A Knife [verse]


Magazine Of Horror #20 (Health Knowledge, March 1968)

Thanks to Gaspard du Nord for scan

Arlton Eadie - The Siren Of The Snakes
G. G. Ketcham - The Rack
Victor Rousseau - A Cry From Beyond
Emil Petaja - Only Gone Before
Nell Kay - The Voice
Murray Leinster - The Monsters

Magazine Of Horror #21 (Health Knowledge, May 1968)

Thanks to Gaspard du Nord for scan

Algernon Blackwood - A Psychical Invasion
David English - The Cunning Of Private Rogoff
Robert E. Howard - Kings Of The Night
Frank Belknap Long - The Brain-Eaters
Col. S. P. Meek - Nasturtia
G. G. Pendarves - The Dark Star

Magazine Of Horror #22 (Health Knowledge Inc., July, 1968)

Robert E. Howard - Worms Of The Earth
Anna Hunger - Come
Laurence J. Cahill - They Called Him Ghost
Rudyard Kipling - The Phantom Rickshaw
Steffan B. Aletti - The Castle In The Window
Algernon Blackwood - A Psychical Invasion


Magazine Of Horror #23 (Health Knowledge, Sept 1968)

David H. Keller - The Abyss [Part 1]
Mrs. H. D. Everett - The Death Mask
Richard M. Hodgens - One By One
Douglas M. Dold - The Thirteenth Floor
Robert A. W. Lowndes - Leapers

Magazine Of Horror #24 (Health Knowledge, Nov 1968)

Thanks to Gaspard du Nord for scan

Francis Bragg Middleton - Once In A Thousand Years
Steffan B. Aletti - The Eyes Of Horus
H. P. Lovecraft - Four Prose Poems: Memory/ What The Moon Brings/ Nyarlathotep/ Ex Oblivione
Ambrose Bierce - A Diagnosis Of Death
David H. Keller - The Abyss [Part 11]

[Craig Herbertson]

Triumph for the vault again. never seen this magazine in my life before. Looks brilliant.

[Craig Herbertson]

Great piece of work Justine and I know well that cackling glee when the bargain has been sealed. my brother calls it the internal smirk.

[Calenture]

Coincidence, or what: When I saw Demonik's MOH post, aside from the usual envy - I only have one of these magazines - I thought, "It would be interesting if Justin used MOH for a Paperback Fanatic article..." then saw his earlier post.

Nov 9, 2008 18:39:08 GMT justin said:

A recent visit to a market stall resulted in me bagging about 20 copies of the Magazine of Horror, all of which pretty much look unread. Doing my best not to cackle manically as I pocketed change from a fiver I spirited the collection away and spun the following article for a future issue of The Paperback Fanatic. Here it is.....

I hope that gets into PF.

Vague memories of the Keller/Lowndes discussion. I wondered at that apparent coincidence of title (Keller's The Abyss, and Lowndes' story of that title in Plague of the Living Dead).

This 1948 omnibus is credited by Fantastic Fiction with the first appearance of The Abyss, and probably the cover'll seem at home on this thread? Tasty looking cover, anyway. Or maybe I should remove it if it's in the way of MOH.

And I only logged in to do one of those, "If you don't have any MOHs, some stories can be found in these books":

Roger Zelazny's Divine Madness can be found in the collection The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth, and also in Terry Carr's anthology New Worlds of Fantasy (Ace, 1967)

Mary E Wilkins-Freeman had a story, Shadows on the Wall, in Derleth's Who Knocks?, and Luella Miller in The Penguin Book of Vampire Stories and Gothic Short Stories.

Howard's Vale of Lost Women in Conan of Cimmeria. Worms Of The Earth, a Bran Mak Morn story in a collection of the same title - I believe it was used for a pretty good black and white Marvel comic in the '70s.

Henry S Whitehead's Williamson was in Haining's The Unspeakable People.

Nothing really obscure covered there; sorry about that. I suppose that's the fascination of MOH for me. The combination of well-known and near-forgotten stories.

Nov 5, 2009 7:49:01 GMT dem said:

Arthur J. Burks - Room Of Shadows: This one is as insane and wonderfully entertaining as Bassett Morgan at his brain-transplant best.

Small point... didn't you tell me that the wonderful and completely barking Bassett Morgan was a she? There you go, you flog your guts out researching and writing a brilliant post, then some bugger has to nit-pick.

Hmm... after a lot of typing, not a lot of real input here (apart from that Keller cover?) Never mind. Shan't waste it.

[dem]

Yeah, i should've thought to update that. The old MOH thread was doing nothing, so i thought i'd give this one a makeover because it's miles better. Anyway;

"Bassett Morgan" was Grace Jones (1885-1974?) who had thirteen stories published in Weird Tales between July 1926 and Nov. 1936, and contributed to all manner of pulps including Westerns, Romance, Ghost and Oriental titles throughout the same period. There also seems to have been a novel, The Golden Rupee, published in 1935. As Robert A. W. Lowndes put it, writing in The Weird Tales Collector # 6 (Robert Weinberg, 1980):

Morgan wrote a number of stories centred around the basic theme of a man's (or woman's) brain being transferred to the skull of an ape. None of them is bad, and one is about as good as another. All of them are equally unbelievable, but fun to read ... an excellent Bassett Morgan story which was not about brain transplants was The Wolf Woman, telling of the resurrection of a primitive female trapped in a glazier.

Best place to find the stories is ... Kurt Singer's Horror Omnibus and Tales Of The Uncanny might as well be called The Magazine Of Horror Omnibus - comparison here - likewise his Gothic Horror Book. I used to be of a mind that Singer had performed an audacious rip off, but on closer inspection, he did reprint some stories that were original to MOH and therefore still in copyright, so an arrangement with the exemplary Mr. Lowndes seems likely, and the reader benefits which is always nice although the lack of editorials, letters and notes is a big miss.

David Keller, some stuff about his collection Tales From Underwood on this exciting dead rubber.

Lowndes - or at least, Health Knowledge - had a number of these magazines on the go at once; Startling Mystery Stories and the sadly short-lived Weird Terror Tales have been mentioned in this section, but there were also Bizarre Fantasy Tales, Thrilling Western Magazine, Famous Science Fiction, Exploring The Unknown and something called Shriek! The horror film fan magazine. Don't know if he edited all of them, but i wouldn't put it past him.

[dem]

Possibly excluding Shriek!, about which i've not been able to find anything just yet, Lowndes also edited ALL of these Health Knowledge magazines..

Bizarre Fantasy Stories ran for two issues Fall 1970 - March 1971 when the wheels seem to have fallen off for Health Knowledge, at least as far as magazine publishing went. It doesn't look all that different to Weird Terror Tales - issue one includes work by Poe, Lovecraft and Henry S. Whitehead - but there is a seductive come-on: both issues contains a story by Eddy C. Bertin.

Debuting in Winter 1966/67, Famous Science Fiction surprisingly survived just the nine issues, the last dated Spring 1969. More reprints from the golden age of pulp. The final effort contained Ray Cummings' The Derelict Of Space, Sewell Peaslie Wright's The Forgotten Planet and A. Rowley Hilard's "powerful chiller" Death From The Stars.

Exploring The Unknown seems to have been the Man, Myth & Magic of the piece, a 'non-fiction' study of the Black & White Arts, psychic powers, the paranormal, unexplained, call it what you will. This ran from the early 'sixties - it may even have been launched alongside MOH and ran for at least 56 issues, probably as many as 60. I wonder if Kurt Singer dipped into this one for his The World’s Greatest Stories Of The Occult

World Wide Adventure. Seven issues from Winter 1967/68 to the Summer 1969, reprints by the likes of Robert Louis Stevenson, William Bligh (The Unfriendly Islands. "The castaways of the Bounty need aid, but dare not make a landing ...") and Richard Sale.

Thrilling Western Magazine. Six issues from Winter 1968/9 through to Fall 1970. My guess is that the bulk is reprint. The final one included stories by Bret Harte, Clee Woods, Palmer Hoyt (Wolf, "an unusual animal story"), Charles Tenney Jackson and R. J. Pearsall.

here's the rest of the Magazine Of Horror's:

Magazine Of Horror #25 (Health Knowledge, Jan 1969)

Robert A. W. Lowndes - The Editor's Page

James Blish - There Shall Be No Darkness
Frederick Marryat - The Phantom Ship
Victor Rousseau - When Dead Gods Wake
Larry Eugene Meredith - The Writings Of Elwin Adams
Clark Ashton Smith - The Colossus Of Ylourgue

James Blish - There Shall Be No Darkness (Thrilling Wonder Stories, April 1950):

"Perhaps God had decided that proper humans had made a muddle of running the world: had decided to give the nosferatu, the undead, a chance at it. Perhaps the human race was on the threshold of that darkness into which he had looked throughout last night."

Fifty plus pages of pulp manna! There Shall Be No Darkness provided the basis for the slightly deranged Amicus shocker The Beast Must Die, though sadly you don't get the thirty second 'spot the werewolf' break until Subotsky got on the case: Loch Rannoch, Scotland. The Newcliffe's house party is enlivened considerably by the discovery that red eyed, hairy-palmed concert pianist Jan Jarmoskowski is a werewolf and must be destroyed. Round and round the estate they roam - Newcliffe, his wife Caroline, psychiatrist and werewolf expert Christian Lundgren, prying artist Paul Foote, Doris the fledgling witch, etc. - armed with their supply of DIY silver bullets. When one of the party is killed, Foote realises that there is a second werewolf among them. This may sound far-fetched but in this story lycanthrope is a highly contagious disease and all it takes is a mere scratch for the victim to become tainted. At the climax, Jarmoskowski gets to tell it from the man-wolf's point of view, and you have to concede they have a rotten time of it.

Magazine Of Horror #26 (Health Knowledge, March 1969)

Virgil Finlay

Robert A. W. Lowndes - The Editor's Page (on David H. Keller's "Cornwall" series)
Seabury Quinn - The Devil's Bride [part 1]
David H. Keller - The Oak Tree
Violet A. Methley - The Milk Carts
R. A. Lafferty - Cliffs That Laughed
James W. Bennett & Soong Kwen-Ling - Flight
Feodor Sologub - The White Dog

Magazine Of Horror #27 (Health Knowledge, May 1969)

Virgil Finlay

Robert A. W. Lowndes - The Editor's Page (on "Timelessness")
Hugh B. Cave - Spawn Of Inferno
Seabury Quinn - The Devil's Bride [part 2]
David H. Keller - The Sword And The Eagle
Donald A. Wollheim - The Horror Out Of Lovecraft
Steffan B. Aletti - The Last Work Of Pietro Of Apona
Robert Silverberg - At The End Of Days

Magazine Of Horror #28 (Health Knowledge, July 1969)

Robert Schmand

Robert A. W. Lowndes - The Editor's Page (on "Realism")
Arlton Eadie - The Nameless Mummy
Seabury Quinn - The Devil's Bride [part 3]
David H. Keller - Raymond The Golden
A. W. Kapfer - The Phantom Drug
Robert Greth - The Rope
Ambrose Bierce - A Revolt Of The Gods
Robert E. Howard - Not Only In Death They Die (verse)

Arlton Eadie - The Nameless Mummy: (Weird Tales, Aug. 1932). Egyptian gallery, Helmstone Museum. Peter Venn is examining a mummy case donated by a recently deceased collector when a beautiful young woman noiselessly enters his sanctuary. She effortlessly deciphers some complicated hieroglyphics and generally shows off that she knows more about the subject than him, and so she should! She is Cleopatra, come to retrieve a ring that was buried with her lover as it contains the green powder that will free her of the curse of immortality. When the deed is done, a tearful Venn slips her into the case beside Marc Anthony ...

Magazine Of Horror #29 (Health Knowledge, Sept 1969)

Gordon MacCreagh - The Case Of The Sinister Shape
David H. Keller - The Thirty And One
Steven Lott - Portraits Of Jacob Pitt
Charles Hilan Craig - The Red Sail
Arthur J. Burks - Guatemozin The Visitant

Magazine Of Horror #30 (Health Knowledge, Dec 1969)

Robert Schmand

Robert A. W. Lowndes - The Editor's Page (on "Making It New")
Robert Bloch - Satan's Servants (Notes and commentary by H. P. Lovecraft)
Lester Del Rey - Cross Of Fire
Richard Wilson - Harry Protagonist, Undersec For Overpop
David H. Keller - The Battle Of The Toads
Theodore Roscoe - Speak For Yourself, John Quincy
Robert E. Howard - Slumber (verse)

Index to volumes #4 and 5 (numbers 19-30)

Lester del Rey - Cross Of Fire: (Weird Tales, May 1939). Karl Harhoffer falls victim to the woman known to the villagers as 'the night lady.' Evil things are whispered and even his Priest turns against him when Karl insists on seeing her. His friends, Flamchen and Fritz, eventually pay for their misguided loyalty, joining him in undeath. It is left to Karl to terminate their reign of terror.

Magazine Of Horror #31 (Health Knowledge, Feb 1970)

Thanks to Gaspard du Nord for scan

Robert A. W. Lowndes - The Editor's Page
Stephen Goldin - For Services Rendered
Robert E. Howard - The Noseless Horror
David H. Keller - The Tailed Man Of Cornwall
George G. Tuttle - The Roc Raid
Paul Ernst - The Duel Of The Sorcerers[part 1]

Magazine Of Horror #32 (Health Knowledge, May 1970)

Robert Clewell

Robert A. W. Lowndes - The Editor's Page (on Norman Spinrad's Bug Jack Barron
Clark Ashton Smith - The Hunters From Beyond
David H. Keller - No Other Man
Janet Fox - Materialist
Henry S. Whitehead - The Moon-Dial
Paul Ernst - The Duel Of The Sorcerers[part 2]

Magazine Of Horror #33 (Health Knowledge, Summer 1970)

Robert Clewell

Robert A. W. Lowndes - The Editor's Page (on "Fiction & Journalism")
Ted H. Straus - Camera Obscura
Edgar Allen Poe - Ligeia
David H. Keller - The Bride Well
Clark Ashton Smith - The Nameless Offspring
Robert A. W. Lowndes - The Road To Nowhere
S. Omar Barker - Back Before The Moon

Magazine Of Horror #34 (Health Knowledge, Fall 1970)

Virgil Finlay

Robert A. W. Lowndes - The Editor's Page (Reminiscences on Seabury Quinn)
Irvin Ashkenazy - The Headless Miller Of Kobold's Keep
Stephen Goldin - Bride Of The Wind
Marion Brandon - The Emergency Call
David H. Keller - Feminine Magic
G. G. Pendarves - The Whistling Corpse
Robert E. Howard - A Song Of Defeat (verse)

Magazine Of Horror #35 (Health Knowledge, Feb 1971)

Robert A. W. Lowndes - The Editor's Page
Stephen Goldin - The Chenoo
Frank Belknap Long - In The Lair Of The Space Monsters
Clark Ashton Smith - A Rendezvous In Averoigne
Thomas H. Knight - Old City Of Jade
Rachael Marshall & Maverick Terrell - The Mystery Of Acatlan
G. G. Pendarves - The Altar Of Melek Taos

Magazine Of Horror #36 (Health Knowledge, April 1971)

Artist uncredited

Robert A. W. Lowndes - The Editor's Page (on "H. P. Lovecraft's views on weird fiction")
Paul Ernst - Dread Exile
Clark Ashton Smith - The Testament Of Athammaus
William R. Bauer - The Vespers Service
Arthur Stryon - The Artist Of Tao
David H. Keller - The Key To Cornwall
Rachel Cosgrove Payes - The Executioner
W. O. Inglis - The Settlement Of Dryden vs. Shard
Robert E. Howard - The Grisly Horror(verse)

Index to volume #6 (numbers 31-36)

[Steve]

Nov 9, 2009 11:55:31 GMT dem said:

Possibly excluding Shriek!, about which i've not been able to find anything just yet, Lowndes also edited ALL of these Health Knowledge magazines..

Don't know if this is any good to you, Dem, or how much you know already but Shriek! - known variously as "The horror film fan magazine" (as you say) and "The monster horror magazine" - was a short lived contender for the Famous Monsters market. Four issues between May 1965 and Winter 1967.
"Produced by The House of Horror in London, for Acme News, New York" apparently. Editor was one Frank N. Stein - possible pseudonym, what do you reckon? The "The House of Horror" bit would seem to be an attempt to associate the magazine with Hammer, who were still very much a household name in horror at the time, and Shriek! had a fair amount of Hammer content.

Don't know what the precise nature of the relationship was between Acme and Health Knowledge (were Acme distributors?) but Shriek! doesn't generally seem to get mentioned much alongside the other Health Knowldege titles you're talking about here. Also it was a different kind of mag - no pulp reprints - so I wouldn't necessarily assume that Lowndes was the aforementioned Mr Stein.

Hope this helps a bit.

[andydecker]

Those are some great covers. A bit crude, but effective.

[dem]

Nov 9, 2009 18:16:50 GMT Steve said:

Nov 9, 2009 11:55:31 GMT dem said:

Possibly excluding Shriek!, about which i've not been able to find anything just yet, Lowndes also edited ALL of these Health Knowledge magazines..

Don't know if this is any good to you, Dem, or how much you know already but Shriek! - known variously as "The horror film fan magazine" (as you say) and "The monster horror magazine" - was a short lived contender for the Famous Monsters market. Four issues between May 1965 and Winter 1967.
"Produced by The House of Horror in London, for Acme News, New York" apparently. Editor was one Frank N. Stein - possible pseudonym, what do you reckon? The "The House of Horror" bit would seem to be an attempt to associate the magazine with Hammer, who were still very much a household name in horror at the time, and Shriek! had a fair amount of Hammer content.

Don't know what the precise nature of the relationship was between Acme and Health Knowledge (were Acme distributors?) but Shriek! doesn't generally seem to get mentioned much alongside the other Health Knowledge titles you're talking about here. Also it was a different kind of mag - no pulp reprints - so I wouldn't necessarily assume that Lowndes was the aforementioned Mr Stein.

Hope this helps a bit.

Thanks, Steve, that is a great help and i'm inclined to agree - it doesn't sound like your everyday RAWL-edited publication. Flicking through the ads, Health Knowledge were responsible for yet another short lived digest, Chase - "Thrills! Chills! Suspense! America's most exciting Crime Fiction magazine" - definitely more his thing but he doesn't seem to have had any involvement? HK were hyperactive in book publishing, too. Most of the titles have a Sexual & Marital Knowledge/ Your Stars & You in 1969 feel, and they were forever trying to flog The Complete Prophesies Of Nostradamus. Another near constant ad was for a Life-size inflatable doll, though this particular item was blamed on 'London Sales', presumably to give it that essential Soho flavour.

There have been so many attempts to exhume Weird Tales, most of which (to me, at least) completely miss the point and get it hopelessly wrong; they'd be OK magazines in their own right, but not under that name. I think Lowdnes understood this instinctively because he was a fan first, editor second and maybe that's why SMS and MOH piss all over the "official" revivals.

[killercrab]

Issue three's cover is the pre production art for Hammer's then titled The Reptiles ( dig the funky hair) - later becoming The Reptile. Similarily the Winter issue sports pre prod art for Plague of the Zombies. Without looking I'd guess this was around '65/'66.

KC