WEIRD WHISPERINGS
by Schwartz and Weisinger
Seabury Quinn returns to Weird Tales in the September issue with the latest Jules de Grandin thriller, "The Jest of Warburg Tantavul".... In prospect for publication in Weird in the near future, but not as yet scheduled, are two stories of brain transplantation by Bassett Morgan, entitled "The Vengeance of Fi Fong" and "Black Bagheela," with great apes and sinister Chinamen springing out of every corner to horrify and amaze the reader.... All of H. P. Lovecraft's tales are sold to WT with the understanding that nothing whatever is to be changed in them.... "The Waning of a World" by W. Elwyn Backus, an old Weird Tales serial, was reprinted in Aviation & Mechanics under the title "A Leap to Mars."
The "Weird Tales" radio program announced some time ago in the Eyrie, has not been given up, but the Hollywood Radio Attractions, Inc., which is handling the broadcasts and the making of the electrical transcriptions, ran into difficulties in trying to get sponsors for the program. However, they are pressing forward in a drive to obtain sponsors in all the various districts.... Paul Ernst, who is about 33 years old, has sold over 300 stories to more than 50 magazines since 1926.... A serial novel set in the Sahara Desert, entitled "Rulers of the Future," written by Ernst, is slated for publication in Weird next winter.... The tale of a mild-appearing, bespectacled American physicist who in a few days forced the world to destroy its armaments and agree to perpetual peace is narrated in S. Gordon Gurwitt's next Weird Tales' story "The Golden Glow."
Mysterious letters postmarked from Washington, D. C., consisting of two mimeographed pages bearing the title "The Battle that Ended the Century" have been received by several well-known fantasy authors, editors and fans. It is a satire, and the character's names are those of popular people in the fantasy field, being thinly veiled. Seabury Quinn wrote Farnsworth Wright that if he didn't know that he lived in Chicago he'd swear that Wright had written them. Frank Belknap Long, Jr. feels confident that they were authored by H. P. Lovecraft who is now touring in the South. "I'm too well acquainted with Howard's (Howard Lovecraft) style," he declared, "to mistake it. It's just a gag...."
"The Distortion out of Space" by Francis Flagg, an ingenious tale of the fourth dimension to appear in the August WT, has a very strange illustration by Harold R. Hammond.... The same number will contain a weird-scientific story by Frank Belknap Long Jr., entitled "The Beast-Helper," a story based on the craze for dictatorships that is epidemic in Europe just now.... Long, Jr., has crashed Astounding Stories with "The Last Men," to appear in the August number.... On hand for a coming issue of Weird is "Yellow Doom" by Robert H. Leitfred, a smashing, quick-moving tale on the old theme of an oriental despot who by his mastery of science tries to make himself ruler of the world.
THE END OF "SCOOPS"
Hugo Gernsback recently received the following letter from L. B. Silvester, the founder of "Scoops," the first English all-stf magazine that we've been hearing so much about.
"In October of last year, I got at the board of Messrs. C. Arthur Pearson, Ltd., of London, one of our big publishing houses. With your magazine as an example, I strove to convince the powers that be. They finally made a compromise—they would turn out an ambiguous sort of cheap weekly which could assume definite adult or juvenile characteristics upon receipt of those indications which a few months of circulation would give.