Some notes made on reading Hugh B. Cave’s book Magazines I Remember: Some Pulps, Their Editors, And What it Was Like to Write For Them, newly on Archive.org and which I linked to yesterday in the post The Cave of Pulps.
* Cave lived in Pawtucket (a long trolley/tram ride from Providence), and sometimes took an apartment in Boston. While he briefly corresponded professionally with Lovecraft in the early 1930s, and Cave had at least two fulsome replies from the master, they never met or even telephoned.
* Newspapers then reprinted pulp stories. Also, Farnsworth Wright nearly interested radio in ‘putting Weird Tales on the air’, to the extent of casting the male lead for a radio adaptation of a Cave story — yet he obviously never succeeded.
* There was an informal blacklist among pulp editors of young authors known to have plagiarised the stories of others and who tried to sell the result.
* Farnsworth Wright marked unpublished manuscripts with red ink dots in the margin, in the process of assessing them, thus making them difficult to send to other editors who knew Farnsworth’s ‘ways’ and could thus spot a ‘Weird Tales reject’. This fact suggests that if a Lovecraft manuscript was rejected by Weird Tales, then he would likely have to retype it — which he hated doing.
* The “summer is a dead time in the pulps”, said of story acceptances in the early 1930s.
* Even when a pulp writer was obviously ‘working at it’ like dog, the early 1930s were a real roller-coaster for the finances of a pulp author. It seems that one could sell quite regularly, sell overseas rights, newspaper rights, and even movie options (to RKO in this instance), as well as selling to the ‘slicks’, and still find oneself living in dire poverty for long periods as magazine failed to pay or went bankrupt. I’d already known something of this re: Lovecraft and R.E. Howard, but it was interesting to see another pulp writer’s detailed perspective on the pulp market in the period.
* The ‘spicy’ pulps could be found on open sale on news-stands in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, in 1934. They were a new development in the market at that time and were rumoured among writers to be ‘under the counter’ yet Cave found it otherwise even in Pawtucket. In Cave’s professional opinion they were no more than regular pulps stories with some hackneyed sex inserted here and there.
* It seems that, to save money, writers often did not buy pulps regularly. With perhaps the exception of Weird Tales. They would only purchase if they were being published in an issue, and then they might buy a number of copies. The British reprint and anthology market would accept magazine pages instead of a typed manuscript.
* In the early 30s Cave held J. D. Newsom in very high regard for his slick funny adventure stories of the French Foreign Legion. A quick look for the name finds there’s a blog review and Pulpdom #46 (June 2006) had the article “The Men Who Made the Argosy: J. D. Newsom”.
* In the 1970s Jacobi thought that much of August Derleth’s ‘juvenile’ work (i.e. what would today be called ‘young adult’) was his strong point as a writer and that many were ‘masterpieces’. Judging by a quick search, the $7 essay collection Return to Derleth (Vol 1) has what might be the best survey of these, with one review stating that an essay by… “Marion Fuller Archer tackles the juvenile novels with rare understanding of their impact on Derleth’s own life.” Jacobi also expresses his puzzlement at the growing ‘Lovecraft cult’ of the 1970s.