Customer Reviews

The Weird Tales Story

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book turned out to be even more fun that I had anticipated. I had previously read several books/chapters by Robert Weinberg and so I expected that the book would be of high quality, and I was not disappointed. Reading the book has led me to purchase a substantial number of other books so that I could read additional Weird Tales stories. Definitely a worthwhile investment!

While this book is a good account of the publication of the classic Weird Tales magazine from 1923 to 1954, buyers should be aware that it was written in the late 1970's and is essentially a reprint. That is no bad thing - many of the contributing writers and some illustrators were still around and able to contribute their own personal accounts. Where it loses a star is, like the pulp magazine itself, in the poor quality of the printing. It reproduces many of the individual covers inside, but they are very small - 3 covers easily fit across the bottom of a page - and in black and white. That is entirely understandable, colour printing is expensive, but the dpi resolution is so very low - the result is that when reading about a particular cover design, it's impossible to see more than a blurry approximation of the general layout. The only place there is colour, at a reasonable resolution, is on the cover. They really should have made the most of that, but the back cover is a blank glossy black, and if you look on the front, you'll see one cover (described in the text as one of the poorer efforts) reproduced twice in the lower right. There are reasonable images of most of these covers on the web if you google, so I am seriously considering printing them out, and pasting them over the murky versions in the book. Reproductions of Interior illustrations fare much better, since they were always black and white, and had to cope with being printed on pulp paper.
An updated and improved edition would be very much appreciated. If it's still possible, I'd like to see every cover of every issue, small but in colour. The reputation of some of the writers, especially H P Lovecraft, has grown even further since 1977 and there is no doubt more that can be said. but in the meantime, this is all there is, and worth buying.