This Weird Tales Collection Blew My Mind (Even Cthulhu Loves It)

[00:00:00][music] [singing] Hi everyone, welcome back to my channel.

[00:00:10]My name is Andrea. I want to talk to you about some weird tale stuff, specifically one recent purchase that I made that was pretty pretty fancy. Now, if you don't know, I uh I do have a a decentsized collection of original Weird Tales magazines, and I'm hoping that this collection will only continue to grow. Now, of course, the ultimate goal is that when I pass away, I will be cremated with all of my Weird Tales magazines, and we will be one. And then we will be placed inside an urn shaped like HP Lovecraft's head, designed by Gahan Wilson, which used to be the World Fantasy Award, but then got cancelled.

[00:00:50]And then that will be kind of lowered into the ocean off the coast of Rhode Island. And hopefully, I will be resting in eternity in the embrace of Cthulhu. I don't know. I haven't given it much thought, but until that day comes, I am going to keep collecting. And not that long ago, um I was feeling a little sad.

[00:01:11]I was on Instagram and I saw this picture. And what it is, it's a slipcase special edition um reprint of some weird tales from 1923 uh pretty much to I don't know the 50s.

[00:01:28]Uh we'll have to look at it together.

[00:01:30]Obviously, we're going to spend some time, but there's only 125 made like this for reasons which we will get into later, and it's edited by Steven Jones.

[00:01:41]Now, I will say that this is from PS Publishing, and it's officially the most expensive thing I've ever bought. I bought it within a minute of seeing that post and I think by the end of the day, it was sold out. Um, the most expensive book I had before that was Morganstrom by Hubie Cave from Carcosa.

[00:02:01]Uh, and I thought, okay, this is like the most expensive thing ever. Uh, but now it's it's this. Steven Jones is pretty amazing. Um, he also edited this book that I love so very much, weirder shadows over Inmouth. This is also a trilogy, but I only have this one. And I got it because this is my favorite book cover of all times. like this beautiful handsome man creature is just beautiful.

[00:02:29]Um, so yeah, Stephen Jones is awesome.

[00:02:32]He's done some incredible work in weird fiction and he has some great anthologies and introductions and we'll get more into it. And the best part is that this will fit in so well on my weird tales or weird fiction kind of anthologies that I've collected over the years cuz I have some from um Bettin Court and um the 100redy year anniversary one introduced by Jonathan Mayberry. I have a few. Uh so this will fit in well on that shelf. So here we have the boxed sleeve. It's very pretty.

[00:03:12]And the bookmark that comes with it that announces, you know, I'm uh I'm certified now to be a member of the Weird Tales Club. I'm I'm so glad that I finally have some real proof. I I was worried. Who needs a Hogwarts letter? Am I right? So, now let's see what we're dealing with. We have three volumes, right? They're all very bright red. And we have volume one, volume two, and volume three. And I'm going to go through them all one by one. Um, and as you can tell, obviously, they've been a little bit rearranged to fit in this thing. Like for example, this one doesn't have volume 3 written in the original, and the edited by Steven Jones is added now so that it's a cohesive thing. Now, the cover for volume one uh has an illustration that was taken out of the weird tales that came out in August of 1926.

[00:04:15]And the artist was C. Barker Petri Jr.

[00:04:19]Uh and he did this one to illustrate The Woman of the Wood by Abraham Merritt.

[00:04:25]And inside the book, uh both the front cover and the back, these are repeated.

[00:04:32]So, I really enjoy these. This back cover is done by John or Yan Arstrom, and this is a 2026 art piece. Uh, and it's again present in all three volumes.

[00:04:45]It's called Fishing on the Outskirts.

[00:04:49]Um, I really like it. It's really vivid.

[00:04:51]I really like this little face up here.

[00:04:54]It's pretty cool. And on the front we have this illustration uh by Gahan Wilson. I did make a video on Gahan Wilson alone uh not too long ago, so I'll link it somewhere. Um he's illustrated a lot for Playboy magazine, which used to be a lot more literary and it did have some class uh in in various ways. It's now kind of known just for one thing, but back in the day it used to have a lot of short stories, including many that were uh published by Nobel Prize authors like Gabrielle Garcia Marquez or even Margaret Atwood is in a few of them. So, um it was pretty literary, but the illustrations were done by Wilson. And he's done that one uh Weird Tales magazine that was from the revival. I think it was from 91 or '92. I'm not entirely sure. I want to say 91. Um, and that's the one that's the end page. And he's most famously known for designing the World Fantasy Award that was the the head of HP Lovecraft and had recently been kind of demoted and replaced with something else. Uh, and it's it's very controversial. So, uh, yeah, back to the flipping. As we go inside volume one, you can see you have like the cover design, um the introduction, which is the early years, and this is done by Stephven Jones, and he looks over at the history of Weird Tales magazine, and we have Why Weird Tales by one of the the sort of founding members. Um, but what's very exciting is this. So volume one and three have a Steven Jones signature and then a faximile signature from Edwin Baird and Farnsworth Wright who are both previous or the first editor and the second of Weird Tales magazine. I can also see that I have copy 44 of the limited 125. And if you're wondering why this is limited, well, the reason comes up more obviously when we get to volume two, because this volume, while it has similar um Fulu, come on. While volume two has similar um faximile uh signatures, it also has five original ones. So here we have Yan Arstrom who did this one.

[00:07:29]Then we have a Ray Bradbury. And these are not faximiles. These are real. And I'll explain in a bit what they are. You can even see it kind of seeping through.

[00:07:39]Then we have Malcolm M. Ferguson, Richard Mat, and Gahan Wilson himself.

[00:07:47]Sorry. Cthulhu please. Sir. So, volume one has 482 pages. This one has 494 and volume 3 has 492. One of the noteworthy things that was sort of briefly touched on in the introduction of this one is that these are kind of the early years and the rocky years of Weird Tales because they were just forming their identity, but also they were kind of in debt, but who saved them out of that was HP Lovecraft with his incredible stories. Like, he kind of kept them afloat. And um it's it's got kind of a lot of the interesting original three like HP Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith. And then in volume two, those genuine signatures are like called signature sheets from five of the original contributors to the magazine.

[00:08:38]So the the five that I just showed you.

[00:08:41]And my understanding is that they just happen to have their signatures, but I guess they only had 125 of them for something on special pages. I don't know how it works to make it appear as like a real signature here. Um, but it's really, really cool. Now, this cover for the second volume is an artwork done by CC Sanf and this is from May of 1932. I have been hunting down this one for a while because um it has one of my favorite stories inside and it's the horror from the mound by Robert D.

[00:09:19]Howard. It's the first official weird western and um I am trying to find it because eventually I do want to find all of them but I really really love it and I like sense like kind of simplistic artwork when you compare it to someone like like Brundage or Lee Brown Koi or Matt Fox. It's it's very different and sort of flat almost. I don't know. I really liked it. So, here we have kind of part two and then the introduction to this one by Steven Jones looks at the magazine and its authors from the 1930s through the 1950s.

[00:09:56]Um, and maybe we'll we'll go through the contents a little bit later. Now, for volume 3, the artwork is taken from Weird Tales magazine from November 1925, and it's done by Andrew Broznich. Um, I'm not entirely sure if it's from 1926 or 25 because on the inside here it says 1926, but then when I looked it up, the original weird tales, it even has 1925 on the cover itself. Uh, so maybe something happened there. I don't know.

[00:10:28]But it's uh illustrating an HG Wells story, the the stolen body. A lot of Weird Tales magazines back in the day uh used to reprint a lot of the classics.

[00:10:39]So you'd have some Wells and Jacqueline Hyde, Frankenstein, that kind of classic classic horror. And it would be alongside new authors which at the time were new like Robert T. Howard and HP Lovecraft. Um and then a lot of the people like you kind of know them now like they're familiar folks, you know.

[00:10:59]So let's let's go back to the first one for a bit and let's look at some of the the stories that it includes. So this one has OO which was the title story of the 1923. This is the one that uh came out in March or February of 1923.

[00:11:17]Um and that's by Anthony M. Rod that kind of became like their classic story.

[00:11:22]And I'll get into that a bit more later in another video because I want to talk about it. And then we have two stories by some of the other editors like Farnsworth Wright and Otis Klene. Then we have Dr. X, a poem by Clark Ashton Smith. Um, the Harry Houdini story here is Ghost Written by HP Lovecraft. We have Cabberry Quinn, August Derlith, who then went on to start Arkham House with um Donald Wandre who is also here and his brother also uh wrote a lot of weird stories. We have Frank Belnap Long and actually since since I'm here I will say that all three volumes have a picture of Steven Jones but they're all with a famous author. So, here he is with Robert Block in 1993.

[00:12:15]And then, um, in the second volume, he's here with Hubie Cave, which I think is pretty cool. And in the third volume, here he is with Richard Mat.

[00:12:29]I mean, those are some pretty cool selfies to have. Uh, now the second one, again, the second volume is the coolest because of all these really neat um signatures that are originals.

[00:12:45]I still want to understand how this was done because right now the only explanation is witchcraft.

[00:12:53]So volume two, we have Whitehead, Lovecraft, Howard, Hub Cave, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Block, Wellman.

[00:13:03]Look, there's Howard Wandre. That's that's the brother. There's an ode to Virgil Finlay from HP Lovecraft. Finlay was one of my other favorite artists of Weird Tales. And um the skull of the Marquy Dad. I do have the original weird tales of that. Now, what's cool is that once you start flipping through it, the artwork inside is the artwork that you would have in the original printed Weird Tales. And back then, all of them were in black and white inside. So, the cover was always in color, but um on the inside, everything was in black and white, which makes it very cool and easy to reprint. like a lot of my other anthologies of weird tales have that because um it's sort of easy to bring it back up the jar.

[00:13:56]So so cool.

[00:13:59]And then the third one, I'm just going to flip through it briefly. So here it says introduction masterpieces of weird fiction, a look at the reprint stories in the magazine and their authors. And then we have Ambrose Beers, HP Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, actually a lot of HP Lovecraft, some Nathaniel Hawthorne.

[00:14:21]Um, and then a lot of classics. I feel like this is that uh old school cool people. They were the giants upon whose shoulders weird tales stood and they walked so HP Lovecraft could run. Although he's he's in here a lot, too. Katulu seems to approve. So, let's put it on the shelf. That's it.

[00:14:47]Thank you all very much for watching.

[00:14:48]We're definitely going to spend a lot more time with these because there's a lot in there I want to read. I definitely want to spend a long time with the essays and some of the the stories. Some I've already read, but I'm just really looking forward to to to taking my sweet sweet time with them. Uh I was so happy I got him. like this is such a joy to me. It's a it's a highlight of my year and um I don't think I'm going to buy anything else until well the end of next week. So I will see you in a future video very soon. Bye.

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