The Penny Press fiction magazine group, which PP had purchased along with sibling puzzle magazines and a few others from Dell Magazines--Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, Asimov's Science Fiction and Analog Science Fiction and Fact--and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, have been sold to a new venture, 1 Paragraph. As Locus has the story:
"Confirmation of this has now appeared on the websites of Asimov’s and Analog, as first reported by Amazing Stories. The ownership language at the bottom of both websites changed recently from '© 2024 PENNY PUBLICATIONS, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED' to '© 2025 1 PARAGRAPH, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Must Read Magazines is a division of Must Read Books Publishing, a 1 Paragraph, Inc. company. No part of Must Read Magazines or this website may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems.'"
"No change has appeared as of yet on the F&SF website, but based on other information I’ve received I can confirm they are included in the purchase.
"The new owner of the magazines is Steven Salpeter and a group of investors. Salpeter is the president of literary and IP development at Assemble Media and previously worked as a literary agent for Curtis Brown. According to a profile on Bisprofiles, 1 Paragraph incorporated on January 16, 2025, in Delaware [Locus reported Florida, but that might pertain to other interests of his] and Salpeter is listed as the corporation’s main officer.
"Saltpeter, a big SF/F fan himself, reportedly assembled a group of investors to make the purchase of the three SF/F mags plus Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Sources say that the magazines will stay in print [presumably as newsstand/subscription hardcopy magazines] and with the current editors. Penny Press has owned Asimov’s and Analog [and Queen's and Hitchcock's] since 1996, when it acquired the Dell Magazines group. Gordon Van Gelder became editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1997, and had been [dba Spilogale, Inc.--Van Gelder's father was a zoologist who worked with skunks, among others] owner and publisher F&SF since 2001, employing Charles Coleman Finlay as editor from 2015-20, and, from 2020 to date, Sheree Renée Thomas."
TM: Ellery Queen's became the bestselling magazine in the Mercury Press group of magazines, which had been established initially to publish H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan's The American Mercury, from EQMM's launch in 1941; and was joined by newsstand book/magazines such as Mercury Mystery. In 1949 MP launched The Magazine of Fantasy, with Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas as editors, which gained its expanded title with its second issue. B. G. Davis bought EQMM from Mercury to help launch Davis Publications (after he left Ziff-Davis) in 1958; Davis Publications would also buy Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine from HSD Publications in 1975, founded Asimov's SF in 1976, and bought Analog from Conde Nast in 1980. EQMM and F&SF will now belong to the same publisher again for the first time since '58; 1 Paragraph might well be eager to promote "media" rights sales for the fiction in the magazines.
And, for various fantastica-relevant news: David Langford: Ansible (this link specifically to #452, the March 2025 issue, but it features links to the archives and future issues, the Ansible Books line, and more), featuring this issue this passage from Barry Malzberg's 1971 novel Gather in the Hall of the Planets, set in and around the 1974 World SF Convention in NYC:
As We Saw Us. Looking forward to the 1974 New York Worldcon: ‘... a multimedia experience coming from the simultaneous showing of twenty-five famous horror films of the past. It is a marathon event, planned to run through the first three days of the convention, but already, on the first morning, a certain debilitation has set in; people are staggering around the room with glazed expressions and many on the chairs appear to be somnolent or in a drug-induced coma. A few couples towards the fringes seem to be copulating with great difficulty ...’ (K.M. O’Donnell [Barry N. Malzberg], Gather in the Hall of the Planets, 1971)
Short Story Wednesday:
Patricia Abbott: "The World at an Angle: Reasons to Love Short Fiction" by Daisy Johnson, The Guardian, 6 March 2019; "The Face" by Ed Gorman, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, April 1993, edited by Kristine Kathryn Rusch (as cited by Jerry House)
William Emmons: Future, Combined with Science Fiction Stories, May/June 1950, edited by Robert A, W. Lowndes, Part 1; Part 2; Part 3
Jerry House: "The Murder at the Duck Club" by Hesketh Hesketh-Prichard, Pearson's Magazine, January 1913; "The Face" by Ed Gorman (in comments); Sleep No More, Nelson Olmsted's short suspense and horror fiction staged reading series for NBC
Tracy K: The Goodbye Cat, a short story collection by Hiro Arikawa (translated by Philip Gabriel)
B. V. Lawson: Media Murder: "Her Upstairs" by (and read by) Michael Z. Lewin, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, July/August 2023, edited by Janet Hutchings
Todd Mason: "Standards and Practices" by Barry N. Malzberg, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, April 1993, edited by K. K. Rusch, and courtesy of Jerry House; as I noted on Patti Abbott's blog: "And just before Ed Gorman's story in the F&SF issue, Barry's casually brilliant setting of Emily Dickinson in 1993-contemporary NYC, and how things go." (This issue of F&SF was one of the few I'd missed altogether in the '90s, and had never picked it up as a back-issue, missing both Ed's story, which was also collected in Confederacy of the Dead and other volumes, and this one by Barry.)
James Reasoner: Real Western Stories, October 1953 edited by Robert A. W. Lowndes; Silverado Press Presents, Volume 1 edited by Jeffrey Jay Marriotte
Kevin Burton Smith: It's Hammer Time! Send-Ups and Put-Downs of Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer
Kevin Tipple: Black Cat Mystery Magazine, #1, August 2017, edited by John Gregory Betancourt and Carla Coupe
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