Popping up on Archive.org, a scan of The Popular Magazine for July 1908. Let’s take a look at what might have appealed to Lovecraft. Joshi has him regularly reading… “Street & Smith’s Popular Magazine around 1905–10″.
Cover: finishing from the deck of a crowded passenger boat. Hmmm, somewhat lacking in fish-monsters.
Looking at the contents, things get more interesting the further toward the back one goes. There one finds items such as…
THE WHITE MAN’S GIFT. A tale of stirring adventure on the Patagonian pampas.
THE WHITE VEIL OF MYSTERY. Tells of the coming of two ships to a strange rock in the ocean.
TALES OF THE LOST LEGION. A Series.
Otherwise, conventional historical sea adventures, modern business tricks, mining and gold in the west, prehistoric adventure.
Even the above three pale when looked at more closely. For instance “White Veil” has nothing of “the bells of faery” about it. “The Lost Legion” is not about Ancient Romans and not set in northern England, but is a ‘lost race’ tale in America.
There are also a number of half-page fillers, such as this which brings to mind “The Dunwich Horror”…
THE two heaviest boys in the world live on a farm in Texas, and, although their united ages do not exceed fourteen years, their combined weights total 360 pounds. The elder boy—William Ashcroft — looks a veritable mountain of flesh … At five years of age he was as large as a full-grown man.
Otherwise it’s difficult to see what Lovecraft saw in it, based on this one issue, though it did sometimes carry more unusual material. September 1907, also on Archive.org, seems equally lacking in any Weird Tales type material. My guess is he picked it up for the sequel to Haggard’s famous She in early 1905, and soon after bagged a discounted three-year subscription. It certainly was good value, 224 pages a month for 15 cents.
