FFB: THE UNKNOWN edited by D. R. Bensen (Pyramid 1963)

D. R. Bensen, the editor at Pyramid Books in the early '60s responsible for a number of their more interesting releases, was also the editor of this anthology out of Unknown Fantasy Fiction, later Unknown Worlds (in an attempt to drag in more sf readers)...and this slim anthology has become easily Bensen's best-known single work, and the best-remembered anthology out of John W. Campbell's fantasy magazine, a title probably even closer to that editor's heart than his sf magazine Astounding was (that magazine later entitled Analog, as it still is known today). For a relatively unadulterated sense of what an issue of Unknown was like, as Jerry House reminds us in comments, check out the issues of the magazine and the one-shot market tester Street and Smith issued in the late 1940s online at the UNZ.org project.

At left is the original edition's rather decent, if text-heavy, cover, and below is the less impressive 1970 reprint exterior (courtesy Bill Crider and his continuing series of back and front covers of paperbacks...note the clever misspelling of Fredric Brown's name on the back cover of this volume). In 1978, Pyramid having been bought by Harcort, Brace, Jovanovich, the line was redubbed Jove Books, and Jove put out an edition with a genuinely ugly, pseudo-pulp cover that had nothing to do with the kind of covers Unknown specialized in...and that cover is rather hard to find online, at least I couldn't this morning. That, however, is the edition I bought (when it and I were new), with Bensen's brief new introduction, appended to the original brief introduction, being the major reason to seek out this last edition (so far).

The 1970 reprint rather grandly suggests that these are the best stories published in the best fantasy magazine that has ever been...and while you might find a number of people agreeing with the second half of that clause (including Isaac Asimov in his preface), relatively few people would agree too strenuously with the first phrase...Bensen was making a point of collecting good, but largely overlooked, stories from the highly picked-over pages of the magazine, and succeeded...glance at the index below, and it's hard to go too far wrong with most of these contributors...but subsequent anthologies from Unknown that were less afraid to include the chestnuts are a better indication of why the magazine, which specialized in the kind of impudent (but not completely lighthearted, as Asimov notes) contemporary fantasy written by Thorne Smith or H. G. Wells, whose dictum that only one miracle per story should be allowed was followed pretty closely, the kind of fiction that has in the last decade or two has often been tagged "urban fantasy"...and the magazine was founded in part to house the kind of near-science-fictional paranoid speculation of such work as Eric Frank Russell's Sinister Barrier.

But Unknown ranged pretty far afield, from Fritz Leiber's best early work (including the novel Conjure Wife, the definitive "urban fantasy" "Smoke Ghost," and the first published stories of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, the sword and sorcery anti-heroes who were easily the next step beyond Conan and even beyond C. L. Moore's contributions to the form...and which John Campbell bought, reportedly each time with the puzzled query as to why Farnsworth Wright at Weird Tales wasn't buying them instead (a very good question, and probably more to do with Wright's many blind spots than anything else, even if most of the best F&GM stories would come in later years--"The Bleak Shore" collected here is a good example of the early stories). "Yesterday was Monday" is a typically well-worked out paranoid "behind the scenes of reality" story from the young Theodore Sturgeon, who, even more than Leiber, was able to do his best early work in the pages of this magazine; Henry Kuttner's "The Misguided Halo" is similarly an example of Kuttner's deftness with the single humorous fantastic element introduced into an otherwise mundane situation. L. Sprague de Camp's "The Gnarly Man" is a fine example of the almost-sf content of the magazine, depending just a bit on magic-science in positing the legal trouble faced by a nearly immortal Neanderthal in the turn of the 1940s US; H. L. Gold's "Trouble with Water" is simply the best story I've read by Gold (and many others suggest the same), a busy writer before World War II who channeled his war-damaged psyche and considerable talent and energy into editing the revolutionary and often brilliant Galaxy Science Fiction and Unknown-like Beyond Fantasy Fiction in the 1950s. Manly Wade Wellman, Fredric Brown, Robert Arthur (ISFDb says, in this case, in collaboration with Fredric Brown, uncredited), Anthony Boucher and the others are represented with fine examples of their contribution to the magazine (and Arthur and Boucher would, in their subsequent editorial efforts as well, seek to publish similar material to that which Unknown and, increasingly, Weird Tales under new editor Dorothy McIlwraith would publish)...which, after being folded by Street and Smith in the face of WW2 paper restrictions on all publishers, lived on as a stronger thread of science-fantasy in Campbell's theoretically all-"hard" sf magazine, which would also explore, increasingly, fringe science in both fiction and supposed (at times) nonfiction contents (crackpottery would be mixed in with utterly responsible nonfictional pop-science coverage in Astounding and Analog throughout Campbell's career and at times beyond; long-term fanzine and fiction-magazine editor George Scithers would note as early as the turn of the 1960s how badly-researched even some of the attempts at sober science articles were, in interesting distinction from Analog's less-"hard" sf rivals, Galaxy and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which at the time had regular and scrupulously researching/self-correcting columnists in Willy Ley and Isaac Asimov, briefly supplemented by Ted Thomas, respectively).

For more of today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog. My review of the sequel anthology, The Unknown 5, which Bensen edited and saw published in 1964.

From the Contento index:
The Unknown ed. D. R. Bensen (Pyramid R-851, Apr ’63, 50¢, 192pp, pb)
7 · Foreword · Isaac Asimov · fw
11 · Introduction · D. R. Bensen · in
13 · The Misguided Halo · Henry Kuttner · ss Unknown Aug ’39
31 · Prescience · Nelson S. Bond · ss Unknown Oct ’41
43 · Yesterday Was Monday · Theodore Sturgeon · ss Unknown Jun ’41
63 · The Gnarly Man · L. Sprague de Camp · nv Unknown Jun ’39
85 · The Bleak Shore [Fafhrd & Gray Mouser] · Fritz Leiber · ss Unknown Nov ’40
97 · Trouble with Water · Horace L. Gold · ss Unknown Mar ’39
119 · Doubled and Redoubled · Malcolm Jameson · ss Unknown Feb ’41
137 · When It Was Moonlight · Manly Wade Wellman · ss Unknown Feb ’40
153 · Mr. Jinx · Robert Arthur · ss Unknown Aug ’41
171 · Snulbug · Anthony Boucher · ss Unknown Dec ’41; reprinted F&SF May ’53
187 · Armageddon · Fredric Brown · ss Unknown Aug ’41

FFB: THE SHAPE OF THINGS edited by Damon Knight (Popular Library 1965); THE UNKNOWN 5 edited by D. R. Bensen (Pyramid 1964)

I've been ill for much of the week, so reduxing...with apologies...but these were among my less popular reviews of years past...

Friday, December 17, 2010

FFB: THE SHAPE OF THINGS, edited by Damon Knight (Popular Library, 1965)

from the Contento indices:

The Shape of Things ed. Damon Knight (Popular Library SP352, 1965, 50¢, 206pp, pb)
· Introduction · Damon Knight · in
· Don’t Look Now · Henry Kuttner · ss Startling Stories Mar ’48
· The Box · James Blish · ss Thrilling Wonder Stories Apr ’49
· The New Reality · Charles L. Harness · nv Thrilling Wonder Stories Dec ’50
· The Eternal Now · Murray Leinster · nv Thrilling Wonder Stories Fll ’44
· The Sky Was Full of Ships · Theodore Sturgeon · ss Thrilling Wonder Stories Jun ’47

· The Shape of Things · Ray Bradbury · ss Thrilling Wonder Stories Feb ’48
· The Only Thing We Learn · C. M. Kornbluth · ss Startling Stories Jul ’49
· The Hibited Man · L. Sprague de Camp · ss Thrilling Wonder Stories Oct ’49
· Dormant · A. E. van Vogt · ss Startling Stories Nov ’48
· The Ambassadors · Anthony Boucher · ss Startling Stories Jun ’52
· A Child Is Crying · John D. MacDonald · ss Thrilling Wonder Stories Dec ’48

This thin volume, without making much of a fuss about it, was the first (and [I incorrectly wrote back in 2010] perhaps still is the only) Best-of the Samuel Merwin and Sam Mines years of Startling Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories, the Other Good sf magazines of the late '40s and early '50s [Mines had actually published a The Best from Startling Stories that included fiction from TWS, during his run with the pulp titles]...magazines with not as distinct personalities as Astounding Science Fiction, John W. Campbell's revolutionary magazine being challenged finally, in part by writers and editors developed and inspired by Campbell but also by (as, for example, Bradbury) writers who were never too compatible with the ASF ethos, or Planet Stories, by the end of the 1940s not only the home of elegant space opera and a regular market for Leigh Brackett and others, but by those years fully as good and about as diverse as ASF...and such magazines stressing sophistication and good prose as Galaxy and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and briefly also such others as Knight's own Worlds Beyond and Howard Browne's mixed bag of the early Fantastic and the upgraded Amazing.

But, for a while, Startling and Thrilling Wonder, as burdened by their pulp-era titles as was Astounding or Amazing (at least Fantastic, and its predecessor Fantastic Adventures, and Weird Tales had descriptive titles that had some specific relevance to their content), were publishing a range of often fascinating and innovative material, including the likes of Philip Jose Farmer's The Lovers, which dealt directly with tragic interspecies romance and helped establish Farmer's reputation, and the contents of this volume...ranging from James Blish's elegant technological "problem" story (how do you rescue a city encased in an impenetrable force-field?) to Ray Bradbury's whimsical notion of a woman who gives birth to an apparently healthy blue pyramid, to Charles Harness's typical blend of space-opera and mind-blowing philosophical and cosmological speculation...Harness is yet another underappreciated writer in the field, except among those who really love and know This Kind of Thing...his influence on his younger contemporaries Jack Vance and Poul Anderson, particularly, seems pretty clear to me.

I've read that on the strength of this kind of material, Startling managed to become for a while the best-selling of sf magazines, presumably outselling Astounding, just starting to drift due to Campbell's fascination with Dianetics, psi powers, and other matters from the fringes of science, and Amazing, just after Howard Browne dumped the lunatic-fringe-stroking Shaver Mystery material (akin to Ancient Astronauts and the more irresponsible UFOlogy coverage then just coming into vogue, with, as with Dianetics and other pop mysticism, some past-life regression elements) that Browne's predecessor Ray Palmer had used to put that magazine into the circulation stratosphere...and before the insurgence in late 1950/early 1951 of Galaxy.

And yet, these magazines from the Thrilling Group pulp chain, which had been morphed (essentially) into the paperback publisher Popular Library, had been so thoroughly eclipsed, a dozen years after the titles were merged and folded, so that the packaging for this book didn't even bother to mention them...as opposed to highlighting the kinds of writers and fiction they were publishing. (Popular Library had published several Wonder Story Annuals in the '50s and '60s, to test the waters, apparently, for the old title.) That legacy stands...even if this volume is now as obscure, certainly to the average reader, as the magazines it draws from.

Also about Startling Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories, and the Thrilling Group
Also about Damon Knight

Friday, January 30, 2009

Friday's "Forgotten" Books: THE UNKNOWN 5 edited by D. R. Bensen (Pyramid 1964)

This fine and somewhat influential collection is for several reasons newly, sadly relevant...it has a cover and a new (in 1964) illustration by John Schoenherr for the previously-unpublished story in the collection, the Asimov...but the other illustrations were from the pages of the original story appearances in Unknown and (its later title) Unknown Worlds, by the recently late (in 2009) Ed Cartier. (In fact, Schoenherr, best known for his Dune and other Analog and also wild-animal/landscape painting, is the [in 2009] only living contributor to the book.) (When Pyramid was bought in the latest ‘70s by HBJ, this anthology was re-issued with an absolutely hideous, by intention, Rowena Morrill cover.)

Also, it was published 45 years ago this month…in its turn 21 years after the folding of Unknown Worlds, in it's turn founded 70 years ago, with much nostalgic and not so nostalgic reminiscence in editor D.R. Bensen’s introduction, who notes that in the US-still-neutral WW2 years, the ads in Unknown and other fiction magazines lent themselves to suggesting ways to keep that $30/week job, rather than such late 1963 concerns as nuclear war (the introduction was clearly written before the Kennedy assassination). Today, of course, we’re much further along, and often most concerned with keeping that $600-900/week job.

Unknown, of course, was the fantasy-fiction companion to the hugely influential sf magazine Astounding, as mentioned in previous posts, and during its 3.5-year run it was the other major pole in fantasy-fiction publishing in the pulps and pulp-like magazines to the similarly legendary Weird Tales (in Unknown Worlds's later years, it was published in a larger size and with better paper than the pulps, with a fairly staid cover format that looked more like The Atlantic Monthly at the time than like the pulps…all factors which might’ve led to its folding in 1943, when paper supplies were getting tight and publisher Street and Smith cut back on several fronts.) Actually, 1939, when Unknown was founded, was a good year for fantasy magazines, with Ziff-Davis first offering Fantastic Adventures (though it was originally primarily a science fiction magazine), the Thrilling Group/Standard Magazines launching the shortlived Strange Stories, and the Munsey magazine group beginnin Famous Fantastic Mysteries, primarily a reprint magazine but publishing some notable original fiction. But in the early ‘40s, the post-Lovecraft/Robert Howard/Clark Ashton Smith Weird Tales and Unknown were the most prominent titles devoted exclusively to fantasy. It’s often been thus since—when Unknown folded, both WT and eventually Fantastic Adventures gained new, good contributions and contributors…even if the latter never completely shed hack adventure fiction cheek by jowl with the better work. When WT folded for the first time in 1954, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction had arisen beginning in 1949 and continuing to the present, while FA was folded into the more ambitious new Fantastic in 1954…though, unfortunately, the tendency toward hack was simply transferred over to Fantastic for the next several years (the notable Beyond Fantasy Fiction sprung up for its run from 1953-1955 as a companion to Galaxy Science Fiction). However, F&SF and Fantastic remained the most visible and consistent markets for new fantasy till Fantastic’s first run ended in 1980 (it was merged with its sf stablemate Amazing Stories, and has been revived spottily since).

Which is a long way ‘round to get to the news that F&SF, now in its 60th year, is dropping frequency to bimonthly status for the first time since the early ‘50s, and that Realms of Fantasy, which has held that “other fantasy magazine" status for 15 years, has been rather abruptly folded by its publisher (April’s will be the last issue); the revived Weird Tales, probably the next most visible US fantasy magazine, seems to be continuing, even as Fantastic will supposedly be relaunched again.

In his headnote for one of the stories within, Bensen notes that the axolotl in the Cartier illustration included with the Sturgeon story is the adult form of the “mud puppy,” apparently the then fairly recent subject of a running joke in Mad magazine…which, coincidentally, is dropping its frequency this year from monthly to quarterly, as Time Warner cuts back at its DC/Mad comics division…

So, finally, to the book’s literary content, an attempt to, even more than with its predecessor The Unknown, concentrate on stories that had not been reprinted from the magazine…including a previously unpublished lead-off story by Isaac Asimov, “Author! Author!” This had been in inventory at Unknown Worlds when the magazine folded, and Asimov had never placed it elsewhere, and it's an amiable if slightly stiff tale of a writer literally haunted by his insufferable detective character, who attempts to steal his creator’s life.

Cleve Cartmill, busy over several decades as a ghost-writer for the likes of Leslie Charteris and possibly Henry Kuttner, as well as under his own name (and famously at the center of a WW2 investigation of his atomic bomb story for Astounding, “Deadline”), has a clever if perhaps excessively folksy deal with the devil story with “The Bargain”…Stephen Vincent Benet or Manly Wade Wellman might well’ve done a bit better with this story…perhaps this kind of thing requires a three-name byline.

Theodore Sturgeon’s “The Hag Seleen” follows (originally published, with some justice, as by Sturgeon and James Beard [not the chef]), a good example of Sturgeon’s work for the magazine, but not among the greatest (such as “It,” considered here previously as part of Knight’s The Dark Half, or “Shottle Bop”). Sturgeon’s child characters could sometimes be a bit cute, and this is an example.

Alfred Bester’s novella “Hell is Forever” might be the earliest published example of Bester’s devotion to “dazzlement” as a technique…keeping this, and such later work as The Demolished Man and “5,271,009,” moving at a breakneck pace with sudden flashes of invention and deft turns of plot. He hasn’t mastered it yet, in this tale of a Hellfire Club-like group who find themselves damned to customized private hells after they wade into deeper water than they expected…but the work is both rewarding fun and promising for what he would go on to do…including a number of other novels, the last and most purely criminous reconstructed by Charles Platt for posthumous publication, Tender Loving Rage.

And "The Crest of the Wave," Jane Rice’s tale of a murdered thug’s posthumous retribution for his murder, is a good, if unextraordinary, example of that kind of borderline crime-story horror, with fine detail.

In short, this gives a good sense of what a good issue of Unknown was like, if not (nor could it quite be) an example of the absolute best the magazine published.

It should probably be mentioned that Bensen’s one sf novel was named for the letter column in Unknown, And Having Writ…

The Unknown 5 ed. D. R. Bensen (Pyramid R-962, Jan ’64, 50¢, 190pp, pb) 11 · Introduction · D. R. Bensen · in 13 · Author! Author! · Isaac Asimov · nv * 43 · The Bargain · Cleve Cartmill · ss Unknown Worlds Aug 1942 61 · The Hag Séleen · Theodore Sturgeon · nv Unknown Worlds Dec 1942 83 · Hell Is Forever · Alfred Bester · na Unknown Worlds Aug 1942 165 · The Crest of the Wave · Jane Rice · nv Unknown Jun 1941 Also about Unknown Also about D. R. Bensen For newer reviews of rather older books,  please see Patti Abbott's blog...

1962/63: Three fantasy fiction anthologies from Pyramid Books: THE UNEXPECTED edited by Leo Margulies, THE UNKNOWN edited by D. R. Bensen, SWORDS AND SORCERY edited by L. Sprague de Camp (and, from other publishers about then, BEYOND and THE FANTASTIC UNIVERSE OMNIBUS)

In 1962, Pyramid Books was widely considered a second-string publisher of paperbacks, but had, in Donald R. Bensen, an intelligent and innovative editor, who among other things was commissioning (or editing himself) some impressive anthologies. The Unexpected was the first of four anthologies he'd buy from Leo Margulies (although the veteran pulp editor/publisher apparently farmed out the editing of at least the latter two to Sam Moskowitz), the first anthologies drawn from the pages of Weird Tales since the magazine folded in 1954, and, first published in 1961, it sold well enough to have a new edition, with a different cover reflecting the new standardized Pyramid design, the next year. Concentrating as it does on the later years of Weird Tales, it featured some of the most innovative and influential writers in fantasy and related fields still active at the time...with stories that were good to brilliant examples of the kind of new horror Dorothy McIlwraith's WT featured in the 1940s and into the 1950s, moving away from the neo-gothic work that the Farnsworth Wright issues had specialized in. 






In 1963, Bensen himself offered a companion, the first anthology (eventually of two Bensen would edit) drawn from Unknown Fantasy Fiction, later Unknown Worlds, to appear since the magazine's publisher had produced a magazine-format best-of, From Unknown Worlds, after World War II to test the waters for possible revival of the magazine. Unknown had folded in 1943 as a victim of relatively low sales during wartime paper restrictions. But while McIlwraith's WT was innovating in modern horror and fantasy, so, too, was Unknown featuring a lot of the kind of modern or "low" fantasy that Thorne Smith and John Collier, or Noel Coward, were writing or had written...nowadays, this kind of fiction is often considered "urban fantasy". The two magazines overlapped in appeal and shared many of their star contributors, even more after Unknown dropped off the market. Editor John Campbell apparently never completely got over the loss of the magazine, and even though his more durable science fiction magazine Astounding, later Analog, was famous for being the primary home for "hard" or scientifically rigorous sf, Campbell would slip at least some borderline fantasy into the mix for the rest of his time as editor.

Though Weird Tales was best known for horror, and Unknown for contemporary fantasy, both featured no little adventure fantasy of the kind that had been tagged, in the early '60s by notable innovator Fritz Leiber, "sword and sorcery" fiction (in part after the model of "sword and sandal" historical drama, often with some fantasy and/or religious elements); L. Sprague de Camp, a writer of historical fantasy and one of those "completing" fragmentary Conan stories and pages left unfinished when creator Robert Howard committed suicide, put together the first anthology to feature the new term in its title...gathering a defining set of classic and more recent stories in the mode. De Camp would go on to do several more anthologies for Pyramid and eventually others. While Lancer Books had the collected Conan stories in the '60s, and Ballantine was publishing most of the more classic epic fantasy in the market, with some items of similar interest published by Avon, Ace and Berkley, among others, Pyramid had these widely-loved antholgies in its catalog.

Swords & Sorcery ed. L. Sprague de Camp (Pyramid R-950, Dec ’63, 50¢, 186pp, pb)
• 7 · Introduction: Heroic Fantasy · L. Sprague de Camp · in
• 11 · The Valor of Cappen Varra [Cappen Varra] · Poul Anderson · ss Fantastic Universe Jan 1957
• 27 · Distressing Tale of Thangobrind the Jeweller · Lord Dunsany · ss The Sketch Jan 11 1911
• 33 · Shadows in the Moonlight [Conan] · Robert E. Howard · nv Weird Tales Apr 1934
• 67 · The Citadel of Darkness [Prince Raynor] · Henry Kuttner · nv Strange Stories Aug 1939
• 97 · When the Sea-King’s Away [Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser] · Fritz Leiber · nv Fantastic May 1960
• 123 · The Doom That Came to Sarnath [revised from The Slot Jun ’20] · H. P. Lovecraft · ss Weird Tales Jun 1938
• 133 · Hellsgarde [Jirel of Joiry] · C. L. Moore · nv Weird Tales Apr 1939
• 169 · The Testament of Athammaus · Clark Ashton Smith · ss Weird Tales Oct 1932

The Unknown ed. D. R. Bensen (Pyramid R-851, Apr ’63, 50¢, 192pp, pb)
• 7 · Foreword · Isaac Asimov · fw
• 11 · Introduction · D. R. Bensen · in
• 13 · The Misguided Halo · Henry Kuttner · ss Unknown Aug 1939
• 31 · Prescience · Nelson S. Bond · ss Unknown Worlds Oct 1941
• 43 · Yesterday Was Monday · Theodore Sturgeon · ss Unknown Jun 1941
• 63 · The Gnarly Man · L. Sprague de Camp · nv Unknown Jun 1939
• 85 · The Bleak Shore [Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser] · Fritz Leiber · ss Unknown Nov 1940
• 97 · Trouble with Water · Horace L. Gold · ss Unknown Mar 1939
• 119 · Doubled and Redoubled · Malcolm Jameson · ss Unknown Feb 1941
• 137 · When It Was Moonlight · Manly Wade Wellman · ss Unknown Feb 1940
• 153 · Mr. Jinx · Robert Arthur · ss Unknown Aug 1941
• 171 · Snulbug · Anthony Boucher · ss Unknown Worlds Dec 1941; F&SF May 1953
• 187 · Armageddon · Fredric Brown · ss Unknown Aug 1941

The Unexpected ed. Leo Margulies (Pyramid G590, Feb ’61, 35¢, 160pp, pb) 
(second edition 1962)
• 6 · Introduction · Leo Margulies · in
• 7 · The Professor’s Teddy-Bear · Theodore Sturgeon · ss Weird Tales Mar 1948
• 17 · Legal Rites [Pohl as James MacCreigh] · Isaac Asimov & Frederik Pohl · nv Weird Tales Sep 1950
• 42 · The Strange Island of Dr. Nork · Robert Bloch · ss Weird Tales Mar 1949
• 60 · Mrs. Hawk · Margaret St. Clair · ss Weird Tales Jul 1950
• 67 · The Handler · Ray Bradbury · ss Weird Tales Jan 1947
• 76 · The Automatic Pistol · Fritz Leiber · ss Weird Tales May 1940
• 91 · The Unwanted · Mary Elizabeth Counselman · ss Weird Tales Jan 1951
• 102 · The Valley Was Still · Manly Wade Wellman · ss Weird Tales Aug 1939
• 115 · The Scrawny One · Anthony Boucher · vi Weird Tales May 1949
• 119 · Come and Go Mad · Fredric Brown · nv Weird Tales Jul 1949
• 154 · The Big Shot · Eric Frank Russell · ss Weird Tales Jan 1949

The first, 1961 edition of The Unexpected:

One of the Berkley anthologies of similar interest is still the only anthology so far drawn exclusively from Beyond Fantasy Fiction, the first fantasy companion to Galaxy Science Fiction magazine, and in many ways a successor to Unknown, edited by one of that magazine's star contributors, H. L. Gold--for no obvious reason, the anthology was edited anonymously, and saw only one edition--which misidentifies its content as sf: 

Beyond ed. Anon. (by Thomas A. Dardis) (Berkley Medallion F712, Jan ’63, 50¢, 160pp, pb)
• 7 · The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse · Ray Bradbury · ss Beyond Fantasy Fiction Mar 1954
• 15 · The Ghost Maker · Frederik Pohl · ss Beyond Fantasy Fiction Jan 1954
• 27 · Can Such Beauty Be? · Jerome Bixby · ss Beyond Fantasy Fiction Sep 1953
• 40 · The Real People · Algis Budrys · na Beyond Fantasy Fiction Nov 1953
• 94 · The Beautiful Brew · James E. Gunn · nv Beyond Fantasy Fiction Sep 1954
• 117 · I’d Give a Dollar · Winston K. Marks · ss Beyond Fantasy Fiction May 1954
• 130 · The Root and the Ring · Wyman Guin · nv Beyond Fantasy Fiction Sep 1954
• 150 · Double Whammy · Fredric Brown · gp Beyond Fantasy Fiction Sep 1954; Naturally, vi; Voodoo, vi
• 153 · Talent · Theodore Sturgeon · ss Beyond Fantasy Fiction Sep 1953

And one of the magazines Leo Margulies founded, in 1953, the same year that Beyond launched, Fantastic Universe, was for its seven-year run one of the few consistent markets for both sf and fantasy on U.S. newsstands, along with The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and the more erratic Fantastic...which saw its own best-of published in hardcover in 1960, edited by its final editor, Hans Stefan Santesson, and reprinted in paperback in 1968 in the US (the UK edition appeared in 1962)...oddly, Santesson chose to ignore stories from the period before he edited FU, which made for a somewhat less representative...and less good...anthology. Also, the volume lacked what was probably Santesson's own translation of a Jorge Luis Borges story, the first published in a U.S. fantasy magazine...which appeared in a late issue of FU, offered about the same time the anthology was...

The Fantastic Universe Omnibus ed. Hans Stefan Santesson (Prentice-Hall, 1960, $3.95, 270pp, hc)
• i · The Flowers of Venus · Vithaldas H. O’Quinn · vi
• viii · Introduction · Lester del Rey · in
• xiii · Introduction · Hans Stefan Santesson · in
• 1 · First Law [Mike Donovan; Robot series] · Isaac Asimov · ss Fantastic Universe Oct 1956
• 5 · She Only Goes Out at Night · William Tenn · ss Fantastic Universe Oct 1956
• 12 · The Pacifist [Harry Purvis (White Hart)] · Arthur C. Clarke · ss Fantastic Universe Oct 1956
• 24 · The Bounty Hunter · Avram Davidson · ss Fantastic Universe Mar 1958
• 30 · The Muted Horn · Dorothy Salisbury Davis · ss Fantastic Universe May 1957
• 45 · A Way of Life · Robert Bloch · nv Fantastic Universe Oct 1956
• 66 · In Lonely Lands · Harlan Ellison · ss Fantastic Universe Jan 1959
• 72 · Fall of Knight · A. Bertram Chandler · ss Fantastic Universe Jun 1958
• 81 · Sit by the Fire · Myrle Benedict · ss Fantastic Universe May 1958
• 91 · A Thing of Custom · L. Sprague de Camp · ss Fantastic Universe Jan 1957
• 114 · Exile from Space · Judith Merril · nv Fantastic Universe Nov 1956
• 157 · Mex · Larry M. Harris · ss Fantastic Universe Jan 1957
• 159 · The Amazing Mrs. Mimms · David C. Knight · ss Fantastic Universe Aug 1958
• 181 · My Father, the Cat · Henry Slesar · ss Fantastic Universe Dec 1957
• 190 · Title Fight · William Campbell Gault · ss Fantastic Universe Dec 1956
• 204 · The Golden Pyramid · Sam Moskowitz · ss Fantastic Universe Nov 1956
• 210 · The Robot Who Wanted to Know · Felix Boyd · ss Fantastic Universe Mar 1958
• 217 · Road to Nightfall · Robert Silverberg · nv Fantastic Universe Jul 1958
• 246 · The Velvet Glove · Harry Harrison · ss Fantastic Universe Nov 1956
• 269 · The Day Will Come... [revised from “The Story Behind the Cover...”] · Vithaldas H. O’Quinn · vi Fantastic Universe Dec 1956

Friday's "Forgotten" Books: THE UNKNOWN 5 edited by D. R. Bensen (Pyramid 1964)

This fine and somewhat influential collection is for several reasons newly, sadly relevant...it has a cover and a new (in 1964) illustration by John Schoenherr for the previously-unpublished story in the collection, the Asimov...but the other illustrations were from the pages of the original story appearances in Unknown and (its later title) Unknown Worlds, by the recently late (in 2009) Ed Cartier. (In fact, Schoenherr, best known for his Dune and other Analog and wild animal/landscape painting, is the only living contributor to the book.) (When Pyramid was bought in the latest ‘70s by HBJ, this anthology was re-issued with an absolutely hideous, by intention, Rowena Morrill cover.)

Also, it was published 45 years ago this month…in its turn 21 years after the folding of Unknown Worlds, in it's turn founded 70 years ago, with much nostalgic and not so nostalgic reminiscence in editor D.R. Bensen’s introduction, who notes that in the US-still-neutral WW2 years, the ads in Unknown and other fiction magazines lent themselves to suggesting ways to keep that $30/week job, rather than such late 1963 concerns as nuclear war (the introduction was clearly written before the Kennedy assassination). Today, of course, we’re much further along, and often most concerned with keeping that $600-900/week job.

Unknown, of course, was the fantasy-fiction companion to the hugely influential sf magazine Astounding, as mentioned in previous posts, and during its 3.5-year run it was the other major pole in fantasy-fiction publishing in the pulps and pulp-like magazines to the similarly legendary Weird Tales (in Unknown Worlds's later years, it was published in a larger size and with better paper than the pulps, with a fairly staid cover format that looked more like The Atlantic Monthly at the time than like the pulps…all factors which might’ve led to its folding in 1943, when paper supplies were getting tight and publisher Street and Smith cut back on several fronts.) Actually, 1939, when Unknown was founded, was a good year for fantasy magazines, with Ziff-Davis first offering Fantastic Adventures (though it was originally primarily a science fiction magazine), the Thrilling Group/Standard Magazines launching the shortlived Strange Stories, and the Munsey magazine group beginnin Famous Fantastic Mysteries, primarily a reprint magazine but publishing some notable original fiction. But in the early ‘40s, the post-Lovecraft/Robert Howard/Clark Ashton Smith Weird Tales and Unknown were the most prominent titles devoted exclusively to fantasy. It’s often been thus since—when Unknown folded, both WT and eventually Fantastic Adventures gained new, good contributions and contributors…even if the latter never completely shed hack adventure fiction cheek by jowl with the better work. When WT folded for the first time in 1954, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction had arisen beginning in 1949 and continuing to the present, while FA was folded into the more ambitious new Fantastic in 1954…though, unfortunately, the tendency toward hack was simply transferred over to Fantastic for the next several years (the notable Beyond Fantasy Fiction sprung up for its run from 1953-1955 as a companion to Galaxy Science Fiction). However, F&SF and Fantastic remained the most visible and consistent markets for new fantasy till Fantastic’s first run ended in 1980 (it was merged with its sf stablemate Amazing Stories, and has been revived spottily since).

Which is a long way ‘round to get to the news that F&SF, now in its 60th year, is dropping frequency to bimonthly status for the first time since the early ‘50s, and that Realms of Fantasy, which has held that “other fantasy magazine" status for 15 years, has been rather abruptly folded by its publisher (April’s will be the last issue); the revived Weird Tales, probably the next most visible US fantasy magazine, seems to be continuing, even as Fantastic will supposedly be relaunched again.

In his headnote for one of the stories within, Bensen notes that the axolotl in the Cartier illustration included with the Sturgeon story is the adult form of the “mud puppy,” apparently the then fairly recent subject of a running joke in Mad magazine…which, coincidentally, is dropping its frequency this year from monthly to quarterly, as Time Warner cuts back at its DC/Mad comics division…

So, finally, to the book’s literary content, an attempt to, even more than with its predecessor The Unknown, concentrate on stories that had not been reprinted from the magazine…including a previously unpublished lead-off story by Isaac Asimov, “Author! Author!” This had been in inventory at Unknown Worlds when the magazine folded, and Asimov had never placed it elsewhere, and it's an amiable if slightly stiff tale of a writer literally haunted by his insufferable detective character, who attempts to steal his creator’s life.

Cleve Cartmill, busy over several decades as a ghost-writer for the likes of Leslie Charteris and possibly Henry Kuttner, as well as under his own name (and famously at the center of a WW2 investigation of his atomic bomb story for Astounding, “Deadline”), has a clever if perhaps excessively folksy deal with the devil story with “The Bargain”…Stephen Vincent Benet or Manly Wade Wellman might well’ve done a bit better with this story…perhaps this kind of thing requires a three-name byline.

Theodore Sturgeon’s “The Hag Seleen” follows (originally published, with some justice, as by Sturgeon and James Beard [not the chef]), a good example of Sturgeon’s work for the magazine, but not among the greatest (such as “It,” considered here previously as part of Knight’s The Dark Half, or “Shottle Bop”). Sturgeon’s child characters could sometimes be a bit cute, and this is an example.

Alfred Bester’s novella “Hell is Forever” might be the earliest published example of Bester’s devotion to “dazzlement” as a technique…keeping this, and such later work as The Demolished Man and “5,271,009,” moving at a breakneck pace with sudden flashes of invention and deft turns of plot. He hasn’t mastered it yet, in this tale of a Hellfire Club-like group who find themselves damned to customized private hells after they wade into deeper water than they expected…but the work is both rewarding fun and promising for what he would go on to do…including a number of other novels, the last and most purely criminous reconstructed by Charles Platt for posthumous publication, Tender Loving Rage.

And "The Crest of the Wave," Jane Rice’s tale of a murdered thug’s posthumous retribution for his murder, is a good, if unextraordinary, example of that kind of borderline crime-story horror, with fine detail.

In short, this gives a good sense of what a good issue of Unknown was like, if not (nor could it quite be) an example of the absolute best the magazine published.

It should probably be mentioned that Bensen’s one sf novel was named for the letter column in Unknown, And Having Writ…

FFB: THE UNKNOWN 5 edited by D. R. Bensen (Pyramid 1964)--from 2009: an overlooked(!) FFB...

This fine and somewhat influential collection is for several reasons newly, sadly relevant...it has a cover and a new (in 1964) illustration by John Schoenherr for the previously-unpublished story in the collection, the Asimov...but the other illustrations were from the pages of the original story appearances in Unknown and (its later title) Unknown Worlds, by the recently late (in 2009) Ed Cartier. (In fact, Schoenherr, best known for his Dune and other Analog and wild animal/landscape painting, is the only living contributor to the book. --alas, Schoenherr died in 2010.) (When Pyramid was bought in the latest ‘70s by HBJ, this anthology was re-issued with an absolutely hideous, by intention, Rowena Morrill cover--see the well-rendered but inappropriate, except to Jove Books hipsters, cover below.)

Also, it was published 45 years ago this month…in its turn 21 years after the folding of Unknown Worlds, in it's turn founded 70 years ago, with much nostalgic and not so nostalgic reminiscence in editor D.R. Bensen’s introduction, who notes that in the US-still-neutral WW2 years, the ads in Unknown and other fiction magazines lent themselves to suggesting ways to keep that $30/week job, rather than such late 1963 concerns as nuclear war (the introduction was clearly written before the Kennedy assassination). Today, of course, we’re much further along, and often most concerned with keeping that $600-900/week job.

Unknown, of course, was the fantasy-fiction companion to the hugely influential sf magazine Astounding, as mentioned in previous posts, and during its 3.5-year run it was the other major pole in fantasy-fiction publishing in the pulps and pulp-like magazines to the similarly legendary Weird Tales (in Unknown Worlds's later years, it was published in a larger size and with better paper than the pulps, with a fairly staid cover format that looked more like The Atlantic Monthly at the time than like the pulps…all factors which might’ve led to its folding in 1943, when paper supplies were getting tight and publisher Street and Smith cut back on several fronts.) Actually, 1939, when Unknown was founded, was a good year for fantasy magazines, with Ziff-Davis first offering Fantastic Adventures (though it was originally primarily a science fiction magazine), the Thrilling Group/Standard Magazines launching the shortlived Strange Stories, and the Munsey magazine group beginning Famous Fantastic Mysteries, primarily a reprint magazine but publishing some notable original fiction. But in the early ‘40s, the post-Lovecraft/Robert Howard/Clark Ashton Smith Weird Tales and Unknown were the most prominent titles devoted exclusively to fantasy. It’s often been thus (with two more or less important US fantasy-fiction magazines "competing") since—when Unknown folded, both WT and eventually Fantastic Adventures gained new, good contributions and contributors…even if the latter never completely shed hack adventure fiction cheek by jowl with the better work. When WT folded for the first time in 1954, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction had arisen beginning in 1949 and continuing to the present, while FA was folded into the more ambitious new Fantastic in 1954…though, unfortunately, the tendency toward hack was simply transferred over to Fantastic for the next several years (the notable Beyond Fantasy Fiction sprung up for its run from 1953-1955 as a companion to Galaxy Science Fiction). However, F&SF and Fantastic remained the most visible and consistent markets for new fantasy till Fantastic’s first run ended in 1980 (it was merged with its sf stablemate Amazing Stories, and has been revived spottily since).

Which is a long way ‘round to get to the news that F&SF, now in its 60th year, is dropping frequency to bimonthly status for the first time since the early ‘50s, and that Realms of Fantasy, which has held that “the other fantasy magazine" status for 15 years, has been rather abruptly folded by its publisher (April’s will be the last issue); the revived Weird Tales, probably the next most visible US fantasy magazine, seems to be continuing, even as Fantastic will supposedly be relaunched again (--or not, as we see in 2013).

In his headnote for one of the stories within, Bensen notes that the axolotl in the Cartier illustration included with the Sturgeon story is the adult form of the “mud puppy,” apparently the then fairly recent subject of a running joke in Mad magazine…which, coincidentally, is dropping its frequency this year from monthly to quarterly, as Time Warner cuts back at its DC/Mad comics division…(--since 2010, it's been a bimonthly).

So, finally, to the book’s literary content, an attempt to, even more than with its predecessor The Unknown, concentrate on stories that had not been reprinted from the magazine…including a previously unpublished lead-off story by Isaac Asimov, “Author! Author!” This had been in inventory at Unknown Worlds when the magazine folded, and Asimov had never placed it elsewhere, and it's an amiable if slightly stiff tale of a writer literally haunted by his insufferable detective character, who attempts to steal his creator’s life.

Cleve Cartmill, busy over several decades as a ghost-writer for the likes of Leslie Charteris and possibly Henry Kuttner, as well as under his own name (and famously at the center of a WW2 investigation of his atomic bomb story for Astounding, “Deadline”), has a clever if perhaps excessively folksy deal with the devil story with “The Bargain”…Stephen Vincent Benet or Manly Wade Wellman might well’ve done a bit better with this story…perhaps this kind of thing requires a three-name byline.

Theodore Sturgeon’s “The Hag Seleen” follows (originally published, with some justice, as by Sturgeon and James Beard [not the chef]), a good example of Sturgeon’s work for the magazine, but not among the greatest (such as “It,” considered here previously as part of Knight’s The Dark Side, or “Shottle Bop”). Sturgeon’s child characters could sometimes be a bit cute, and this is an example.

Alfred Bester’s novella “Hell is Forever” might be the earliest published example of Bester’s devotion to “dazzlement” as a technique…keeping this, and such later work as The Demolished Man and “5,271,009,” moving at a breakneck pace with sudden flashes of invention and deft turns of plot. He hasn’t mastered it yet, in this tale of a Hellfire Club-like group who find themselves damned to customized private hells after they wade into deeper water than they expected…but the work is both rewarding fun and promising for what he would go on to do…including a number of other novels, the last and most purely criminous reconstructed by Charles Platt for posthumous publication, Tender Loving Rage.

And "The Crest of the Wave," Jane Rice’s tale of a murdered thug’s posthumous retribution for his murder, is a good, if unextraordinary, example of that kind of borderline crime-story horror, with fine detail.

In short, this gives a good sense of what a good issue of Unknown was like, if not (nor could it quite be) an example of the absolute best the magazine published.

It should probably be mentioned that Bensen’s one sf novel was named for the letter column in Unknown, And Having Writ…

for more (and original!) FFB entries, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

Saddam Hussein approved, as did Jove Books....

FFB: UNKNOWN WORLDS: TALES FROM BEYOND edited by Stanley Schmidt and Martin Harry Greenberg (Galahad 1989; Bristol Park 1993)

It's remarkable, as I've noted here some time back, that there's never been an anthology taken from even the original run of the magazine Weird Tales (1923-1954), much less its revivals additionally, that can said to have been definitive...though there have been some game tries, and any large anthology from the magazine tends to be impressive at very least in parts, even if the thin paperbacks ghost-edited by Sam Moskowitz and credited Leo Margulies are less so (with the rather good exception of The Unexpected, not packaged as a WT antho and possibly not edited by Moskowitz).  But contrast this with the fate of the legacy of the most fondly-remembered US fantasy magazine of the pulp era after or perhaps even alongside Weird Tales, Unknown, in later issues Unknown Worlds. D. R. Bensen, editor at Pyramid Books in the early '60s (the publisher's editor and publishers of the Margulies/Moskowitz WT volumes), published two widely-read anthologies, The Unknown (1963) and The Unknown 5 (1964), and in the UK George Hay had as his first published fantastic-fiction anthology a similar draw from the magazine entitled Hell Hath Fury (1963), after Cleve Cartmill's included story. Today's book, published as an "instant remainder" in two separate editions by different discount publishers, was the second attempt at mining the thirty-nine issues of the magazine to be edited by Stanley Schmidt, after his slimmer anthology called simply Unknown, for Baen Books, published at nearly the same time, in 1988, and perhaps a better and certainly a complementary selection. And for selections exclusively from one of the most influential of magazines devoted to fantasy, that appears to be all published so far, unless we count From Unknown Worlds, almost a special issue and best-of which Unknown publisher Street & Smith released in 1948 to see if a revival of the magazine, which been folded in the face of WWII paper shortages, would be fiscally viable (S&S, as Walker Martin reminds us in the essay linked to in comments, was already about to dump all their fiction magazines by the next year anyway, in favor of focusing on such women's "slick" magazines as Charm and Mademoiselle and other nonfiction titles; I suspect they kept Astounding SF exclusively because they wanted to have a reason to retain John Campbell, whom they might've wanted to edit another potential relaunch of Air Trails and Science Frontiers, albeit his first stint at that project was short-lived [1946-48]; Frederik Pohl notes as much here) . This despite such survey anthologies as Terry Carr and M.H. Greenberg's A Treasury of Modern Fantasy and, even more. a volume called The Rivals of Weird Tales being also in large part, though by no means exclusively, devoted to collecting Unknown's fiction. Considering that there has been only one anthology drawn exclusively from its rather impressive 1950s imitator, Beyond Fantasy Fiction, perhaps this shouldn't be too surprising, this relative neglect, but given the towering reputation of the magazine, it remains a bit odd. 

Unknown Fantasy Fiction was launched in 1939 as a second magazine edited for Street & Smith by John W. Campbell, Jr., who had been editor of Astounding Science Fiction since 1937 and was just beginning to come into his own as an editor; some of the best and most influential writers to work closely with Campbell, including Theodore Sturgeon, Fritz Leiber, L. Sprague de Camp, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov (who was always quick to note that he wasn't all that prominent in his earliest career), Lester del Rey, A. E. van Vogt, Henry Kuttner and Catherine L. Moore (soon to be collaborative on all their work), and others had either been introduced or first started publishing with Campbell in 1939; Campbell, like some of his key contributors (such as Sturgeon, Leiber, Alfred Bester, L. Ron

Hubbard in his less controversial years and such now relatively obscure writers  as Jane Rice), often seemed to enjoy offering, even more than their sf, the kind of rationalized contemporary (or "low" or latterly "urban") fantasy--fiction with only a few intentional deviations or even only one fantasticated element in an otherwise realistic context--that the magazine specialized in, particularly in its horror and Thorne Smith-style less-grim content (reminiscent of H.G. Wells's prescription for only one miracle per story). Though the magazine also published some "high" or epic/sword & sorcery fantasy, particularly in some of the contributions from Leiber, whose hugely influential Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories were first published there, and in historical or folkloric fantasy by the likes of de Camp  and Fletcher Pratt (both notable for their historical fiction and nonfiction in other contexts), and to some extent Hubbard, with his "Slaves of Sleep".  

Of the handful of Unknown anthologies, this one might be the closest to definitive, though in part because it features perhaps too many of the same stories that particularly Bensen had selected for his books...and overlooks some of the most key stories published by the magazine, such as Fritz Leiber's "Smoke Ghost" (which Algis Budrys wasn't alone in crediting with essentially inventing the urban fantasy mode)...perhaps because Schmidt had included that story in his earlier anthology. A number of the stories included here are (deservedly) chestnuts of fantasy-fiction anthologies, such as de Camp's "The Gnarly Man" (which just Barely could qualify as science fiction, if one squints, and thus might justify the cover banner on both editions of this book claiming that it features "classic science fiction and fantasy") and Sturgeon's "It" and H. L. Gold's "Trouble with Water". This anthology, even more than the others from the magazine, also demonstrates how many of the writers at the heart of Unknown were also contributors to Weird Tales, even if some of them, like Sturgeon and Anthony Boucher (and once, notably, Heinlein) began contributing to WT after Unknown's folding, and new WT editor Dorothy McIlwraith's openness to this kind of story. But this anthology features notable stories by Robert Bloch, Manly Wade Wellman, C. L. Moore, F. B. Long and such widely-publishing writers as Fredric Brown, Robert Arthur and Jack Williamson. 

This is, at least, a fine introduction to the fiction from the magazine, but the lack of a substantial introduction or headnotes to the stories (a rare lack in a Greenberg anthology) make it less useful for new readers to orient themselves or understand the context in which the magazine was published, something that Bensen's anthologies do remarkably well. And, for good or ill, it won't take as long to gather and read through all the books drawn from Unknown as it does for Weird Tales, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction or even Whispers...

from the Contento/Locus index:

Unknown Worlds: Tales from Beyond ed. Stanley Schmidt & Martin H. Greenberg (Galahad Books 0-88365-728-7, 1988 [Jun ’89], $9.98, 517pp, hc) Anthology of 25 stories originally published in Unknown/Unknown Worlds. An instant remainder book, this has a 1988 copyright date but was not seen until 1989.

• · Introduction · Stanley Schmidt · in
• 1 · Trouble with Water · Horace L. Gold · ss Unknown Mar ’39
• 17 · The Cloak · Robert Bloch · ss Unknown May ’39
• 30 · The Gnarly Man · L. Sprague de Camp · nv Unknown Jun ’39
• 46 · The Misguided Halo · Henry Kuttner · ss Unknown Aug ’39
• 59 · Two Sought Adventure [Fafhrd & Gray Mouser] · Fritz Leiber · nv Unknown Aug ’39
• 85 · When It Was Moonlight · Manly Wade Wellman · ss Unknown Feb ’40
• 96 · The Pipes of Pan · Lester del Rey · ss Unknown May ’40
• 108 · It · Theodore Sturgeon · nv Unknown Aug ’40
• 126 · Fruit of Knowledge · C. L. Moore · nv Unknown Oct ’40
• 150 · The Wheels of If [Park Alister] · L. Sprague de Camp · na Unknown Oct ’40
• 204 · The Bleak Shore [Fafhrd & Gray Mouser] · Fritz Leiber · ss Unknown Nov ’40
• 212 · They · Robert A. Heinlein · ss Unknown Apr ’41
• 224 · Armageddon · Fredric Brown · ss Unknown Aug ’41
• 228 · Mr. Jinx · Robert Arthur · ss Unknown Aug ’41
• 241 · A Gnome There Was · Henry Kuttner · nv Unknown Oct ’41
• 260 · Hereafter, Inc. · Lester del Rey · ss Unknown Dec ’41
• 271 · Snulbug · Anthony Boucher · ss Unknown Dec ’41; F&SF May ’53
• 283 · The Refugees · Frank Belknap Long · ss Unknown Feb ’42
• 291 · Hell Is Forever · Alfred Bester · na Unknown Aug ’42
• 353 · The Hag Séleen · Theodore Sturgeon · nv Unknown Dec ’42
• 367 · The Witch · A. E. van Vogt · nv Unknown Feb ’43
• 385 · Conscience, Ltd. · Jack Williamson · ss Unknown Aug ’43
• 402 · Greenface · James H. Schmitz · nv Unknown Aug ’43
• 423 · Hell Hath Fury · Cleve Cartmill · na Unknown Aug ’43
• 493 · Blind Alley · Malcolm Jameson · nv Unknown Jun ’43

For more of today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.