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Post by Dr Strange on Apr 11, 2021 13:39:23 GMT
I would think that the different reception of the horror tale in the 30s in England vs America is in parts due that in England and on the continent there wasn't the this big magazine market i.e. the pulps.
Not sure about the rest of Europe or the US, but there was a huge magazine market in the UK in the 20s and 30s, and much of it seems to have occasionally or regularly carried ghost/horror/weird short stories. I only started to realize how many magazines there were when I was reading the British Library Tales of the Weird books - there are stories from magazines that I vaguely knew existed (like The Strand and Blackwood's), but most are from magazines I'd never heard of (can't remember names, but they must run to a few dozen now). Unfortunately, I don't know anything about this stuff, but wikipedia says The Strand was selling up to half a million copies per month in the 20s and 30s. When you factor in how small the population was then compared to now, that seems pretty impressive. I think the thing that really started to kill off the magazine market in Britain was wireless radio, but that was really only starting to take off by the early 30s (I think). Maybe it was different in the US for geographical reasons.
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Post by andydecker on Apr 11, 2021 15:07:23 GMT
Not sure about the rest of Europe or the US, but there was a huge magazine market in the UK in the 20s and 30s, and much of it seems to have occasionally or regularly carried ghost/horror/weird short stories. I've really only started to realize how many magazines there were when I was reading the British Library Tales of the Weird books - there are some stories from magazines that I vaguely knew existed (like The Strand and Blackwood's), but most seem to be from magazines I never knew about (can't remember names, but they must run to a few dozen now). Unfortunately, I don't really know anything about this stuff, but wikipedia says The Strand sold around half a million copies per month in the 20s and 30s. When you factor in how small the population was then compared to now, that seems pretty impressive. I think the thing that really started to kill off the magazine market in Britain in the 20s and 30s was wireless radio, which we got into pretty early. This is interesting! I fear that a lot of supposed facts about the history of the horror genre have their origin not in actual research. Just take Weird Tales. It is so often presented as the forerunner of the genre in the pre-war years, while it must have been in reality an rather obscure magazine always on the verge of cancellation. Of course it brought forth Lovecraft, Howard, Smith, Quinn and the rest, but I guess it was mostly preaching to the choir. It never had noteworthy commercial competitors, it is not like the SF magazines of the time. Or the Western or Crime. I know of The Strand in the UK and London Mystery Magazine, it was really interesting to see the later on luminist org, but that there also was a lively fiction market between the wars is also news to me. It is a pity that these cultural histories are lost. Have you run across the Playboy Book Of Horror & The Supernatural (1968)? As you'd expect, the list of contributors is impressive (albeit tilted toward male authors, which I suppose is also to be expected given the nature of the magazine). Never knew this existed. Thanks for mentioning it! I should have known that Playboy did something like that :-), they always were lively in that regard. A stellar list of contributors. While Playboy of course was among the best paying gigs at the time, I honestly don't believe that the editors were against female writers. For Playboy it would have indeed be a coup to publish female writers.
That there were so few female genre writers at the time is rather a sign that they were smarter than to work for those low-paying markets in genres that were done primarily for men. The opportunities of writing for female markets must have been much better than trying to break in the SF or Western.
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Post by Swampirella on Apr 11, 2021 15:19:02 GMT
But I think it wouldn't have been too difficult to do a book with the best of Rogue, Cavalier and Playboy in the 70s. Have you run across the Playboy Book Of Horror & The Supernatural (1968)? As you'd expect, the list of contributors is impressive (albeit tilted toward male authors, which I suppose is also to be expected given the nature of the magazine). Reviews of it on Goodreads are mostly very good, except for "Bunny" who really didn't like it at all. Although I'm not going to get one myself, there are a few copies available at a reasonable price.
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Post by cauldronbrewer on Apr 11, 2021 15:40:59 GMT
Reviews of it on Goodreads are mostly very good, except for "Bunny" who really didn't like it at all. Although I'm not going to get one myself, there are a few copies available at a reasonable price. I’ve read it and would recommend it—not all the stories are hits, but Ray Russell was a talented editor (and writer, too). On women authors and Playboy: I was interested to see that Margaret Atwood and Ursula Le Guin both published stories in the magazine, though the latter has described how the editors requested that she use her initials instead of her first name to conceal her gender.
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Post by Dr Strange on Apr 11, 2021 16:11:16 GMT
I know of The Strand in the UK and London Mystery Magazine, it was really interesting to see the later on luminist org, but that there also was a lively fiction market between the wars is also news to me. It is a pity that these cultural histories are lost. Mike Ashley (who else?) published The Age of the Storytellers: British Popular Fiction Magazines, 1880–1950 in 2006, but it is ridiculously expensive and I haven't read it. But I have read a review of it that says, "Ashley has catalogued, described, and analysed a total of 144 titles - 70 of them devoted entirely, or at least in large measure, to fiction" with "shorter entries on 74 'Other Magazines', in which fiction provided less than half their content, but was nonetheless a major source of audience appeal". Many of these would surely have had limited circulation, maybe just tens (rather than hundreds) of thousands of copies sold per month (most were monthlies I think), or would have already disappeared by the 1920s, but that's still a hell of a lot of short stories getting read, even if only a small proportion of those are genre. I don't really know what I am talking about here, but the biggest difference in the US seems to have been having so many genre-specific titles; I don't think there was really any difference in "quality", or even that much difference in style - some of the ones in the BL books aren't that different to what you'd have seen in Weird Tales, especially if you subtract the whole "mythos" thing that seems to overshadow any discussion of the US pulps. I do wonder about all the awful "weird" stories there must be in the BL archives that didn't make the cut for their books though.
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Post by andydecker on Apr 11, 2021 19:30:52 GMT
Fascinating info, Dr. A big thank you!
I played a bit with Big Brother G and found a few sound bytes from the book. Very interesting. I never checked but I never imagined that series like Father Brown were published in story magazines. Or Woodhouse. So much for operational blindness. I guess reading so much about the American pulp culture taints the view.
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Post by jamesdoig on Apr 11, 2021 23:27:16 GMT
Not sure about the rest of Europe or the US, but there was a huge magazine market in the UK in the 20s and 30s, and much of it seems to have occasionally or regularly carried ghost/horror/weird short stories. I only started to realize how many magazines there were when I was reading the British Library Tales of the Weird books - there are stories from magazines that I vaguely knew existed (like The Strand and Blackwood's), but most are from magazines I'd never heard of (can't remember names, but they must run to a few dozen now). Unfortunately, I don't know anything about this stuff, but wikipedia says The Strand was selling up to half a million copies per month in the 20s and 30s. When you factor in how small the population was then compared to now, that seems pretty impressive. I think the thing that really started to kill off the magazine market in Britain was wireless radio, but that was really only starting to take off by the early 30s (I think). Maybe it was different in the US for geographical reasons. That's right, important ones that are now almost impossible to find are those Harmsworth magazine like The Red Magazine (publishers seemed to like colour titles for some reason Blue Book Magazine, Yellow Magazine, Red Magazine etc). It's indexed here: www.philsp.com/homeville/fmi/c/clm597.htm#A5295 - lots of horror by important writers in that one. Another hard to find magazine with some supernatural content was The Grand Magazine, but there were a lot of them, like T he Cornhill, which went right up to the 1970s. George Locke originally indexed some of the Harmsworth magazines in one of his publications - Mike Ashley sent me a photocopy, but it's at home in Canberra so I can't scan it for you, but the FictionMags index has an awful lot of stuff in it - a major ongoing project by Phil Stevenson-Payne with lots of volunteers! Of course, at Christmas time magazines would often publish ghost stories - I've got a couple of Christmas numbers of the Illustrated London News from the 1950s that have stories by Robert Aickman in them.
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Post by pulphack on Apr 12, 2021 6:59:29 GMT
Dr S and James are quite right here - in the UK there were a large number of fiction magazines, and as with the birth of the single volume novel and the paperback a lot of it can be put down to the railways and WH Smith. Their demand for this kind of publication birthed so many; the public bought them as the were well-displayed; and so it goes around and grows. Mass literacy and the birth of the 'clerk' classes also encouraged this - the kind of families who had slightly more disposable income so well described in 'Diary Of A Nobody' and 'Three Men In A Boat'. They wanted fiction that was light and disposable, both intellectually and physically, and so the magazine with its monthly novelty of the new came to prominence. The juvenile market was also a proving ground for writers and readers - Harmsworth and DC Thomson weren't going to go broke on it, were they?
As regards the fact that horror, weird fiction and ghost stories were not delineated into genre magazines - well, it must be born in mind that even crime and detetcive fiction didn't really come into its own as a genre until post-WWI, which is why the 'Golden Age' came to exist as such - the first defined flowering of the form. The same can be said for romance, as 'romance' was a term generally used prior to that for sweeping stories that took you to other places, rather than purely love stories.
In the USA it seems to me that they codified genre earlier because they were quicker off the mark in terms of marketing to maximise their space on the news stands. That kind of codification didn't seep into UK publishing until the US influence hit the public via Hollywood. For, as DR S points out, radio started the slow demise of magazines as it was an alternative. So, too, was cinema: pre WWI it wasn't technically advanced enough to be a competitor, more a compliment to going home and reading. Longer films and sound changed that. Radio was very talk-oriented in its early days, and the music was only grudgingly populist. Again, different to the US.
The genre or type of story has always existed - but mass readership and then other mass media seemed to dictate that the more rigid codification was necessary to reach out through the sea of sheer bulk and alert its intended audience it was there. The prominence of genre as a signifier was really about economics more than art. But isn't that usually the way?
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Post by dem bones on Apr 12, 2021 17:31:17 GMT
Apart from the pulps and slicks, newspapers, national and regional, always helped keep things ticking over. Arguably the most famous example being Arthur Machen's The Bowmen, which first appeared in the The London Evening News, for September 29, 1914. The same newspaper were the first to publish M. R. James' essay Ghosts - Treat Them Gently (17 April 1931) and also serialised Machen's The Terror from mid-October 1916. There's a treasure trove awaits in the British Newspaper Archive. Similarly, I'm sure if someone had the time to to study the women's weeklies they'd find several anthologies worth of the genre fiction of their choice.
While I was sorting through stuff for Victorian fiction thread last week, found this unweildly, undated 880 page bound vol of Cassells (turns out it's from 1869). Couple of promising story titles - A Ghostly Bargain, A Terrible Vengeance, A Cruise on a Plague Ship, Six Lives or One? A Tale of the Mutiny. Tucked away toward the back, Le Fanu's A Strange Adventure in the Life of Miss Laura Midmay serialised over seven weeks.
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Post by andydecker on Apr 12, 2021 19:39:39 GMT
Again a big thank you to all. It gave me a new perspective on many things. I was really fixated on the Pulps and their myth.
How radically the book business changed in the 70s and then in the 90s, not only in the UK. I grew up with the categories, crime fiction, western, SF, all had its own little imprint.
Crime got fused into the mainstream, western died, horror got reduced to a lucky few writers also in mainstream programs and SF got replaced by Fantasy and then scaled back. What had been dozens of books is now a handful, if you don't count indepetendly published, YA and the small press.
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Post by Michael Connolly on Apr 14, 2021 11:27:33 GMT
It is a good one. The reason we didn't include it in the book was because it had already been reprinted in A Pleasing Terror, and we were aiming to concentrate on harder to find articles (not that A Pleasing Terror is easy to find nowadays, of course, except as an ebook). It's a great shame that Sam Russell never completed his essay: what was published was just part one. I thought that he did complete it. He wrote a revised version, only the first half of which was published in Haunted#2 and 3, which he edited. 2 appeared in 1964, 3 in 1968. 3 was the last issue. It will cost you over £350.00 to get a fine/like new copy of A Pleasing Terror nowadays. It is illustrated throughout by good pictures like this for "The Tractate Middoth" by Paul Lowe.
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Post by helrunar on Apr 14, 2021 13:22:34 GMT
Dear darling Dr Rant... always a joy and a delight!
cheers, Hel
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Post by andydecker on Apr 16, 2021 19:16:21 GMT
It will cost you over £350.00 to get a fine/like new copy of A Pleasing Terror nowadays. It is illustrated throughout by good pictures like this for "The Tractate Middoth" by Paul Lowe. I liked both pictures, even the book cover. It let me re-read the story. I liked others better. IMHO it lacked a bit in structure, the two different parts - the inheritance and the ghost - didn't mesh well, especially as the coincidence of the meeting of the two parties is a bit hard to believe.
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