Leo Margulies died on December 26, 1975, at age seventy-five. As I understand it, Robert Weinberg acquired the Weird Tales property from Margulies' widow. Mr. Weinberg had assembled and published a commemorative book, WT 50: A Tribute to Weird Tales, a year and a half before Margulies' death, in the same season that the last of the Margulies-Moskowitz issues of Weird Tales was published. Mr. Weinberg followed that up with The Weird Tales Story, published in 1977 by FAX Collector's Editions of West Linn, Oregon. In the meantime, the magazine itself laid dormant.
Born in 1930, Lin Carter became a fantasy fan as a child. In 1957 he went to work in advertising and publishing, only to strike out on his own as a freelance writer and editor in 1969. Many if not most of his own books were pastiches or imitations of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, H.P. Lovecraft, and other writers. A more charitable way of looking at Carter's career is that he wrote tributes to the great fantasy authors of the past, or that he wrote the books they might have written had they lived. He did his fellow fantasy fans an invaluable service by editing Ballantine Books' Adult Fantasy series of 1969-1974. He also edited the Flashing Swords series of heroic fantasy (1973-1977) and The Year's Best Fantasy Stories series for Donald A. Wollheim (1975-1980). By 1980 he was ready to give Weird Tales a try.
Lin Carter edited and Zebra Books published four "issues" of Weird Tales from 1981 to 1983. Those four issues comprise volume 48 of the series. The odd thing about them is that they aren't magazines but instead mass market paperbacks, numbered sequentially like a magazine title and even including a letters column. In his first editorial, Carter wrote that he and his publishers "concluded that the pulp magazine era is truly at an end and that such periodicals simply cannot compete in the marketplace with the enormously popular paperback book," hence the decision to "revive Weird Tales as a 'paperback periodical'." Carter sounded as though he had high hopes for the revival. Instead he got no farther (in the number of issues at least) than Sam Moskowitz had before him.
I don't think anyone would argue against the idea that the pulp magazine era had ended many years before Lin Carter's Weird Tales went to print. (The only argument might be as to when it had ended: The mid or late forties? Sometime during the 1950s? Certainly no later than the early sixties.) At first glance, you might see paperback books as one of the nails in the coffin of pulp magazines. It might be more accurate to say that paperbacks are just pulp magazines in a different format.
The relationship between pulps and paperbacks is on full display in Volume 48 of Weird Tales. That's not to say that it was a first. Donald A. Wollheim approached the idea with his Avon Fantasy Reader series of 1946-1952. Other publishers issued "paperback periodicals" in the 1960s and '70s. Leo Margulies' four-book series of Weird Tales anthologies from the 1960s may have been a model for Lin Carter's effort. Byron Preiss' Weird Heroes series of "New American Pulp," published in the 1970s, would have been closer at hand.
In any case, Weird Tales, Volume 48, was a mix of old and new material. H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and other prized writers of the original Weird Tales were represented. So were newer writers such as Ramsey Campbell, Tanith Lee, and of course Lin Carter. Like the preceding incarnation, Carter's Weird Tales lasted four issues. The gap separating it from the following volume would be narrow indeed.
Weird Tales
Spring 1981 to Summer 1983
4 issues (Volume 48)
Published by: Zebra Books (Kensington Publishing Corp.)
Edited by: Lin Carter
Format: Mass market paperback
Edited by: Lin Carter
Format: Mass market paperback
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| Weird Tales, Volume 48, Number 1. The book bears a copyright date of 1980. According to Jaffery and Cook's Collector's Index to Weird Tales, the date was Spring 1981. In any case, this was the first of Lin Carter's version of Weird Tales, issued in the form of a mass market paperback. The cover art is by Tom Barber. |
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| Weird Tales, Volume 48, Number 2, Spring 1981, with cover art again by Tom Barber. |
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| Weird Tales, Volume 48, Number 3, Fall 1981. Tom Barber was the cover artist. |
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| Weird Tales, Volume 48, Number 4, Summer 1983. Tom Barber was the cover artist again. |