THE EYRIE
It’s a strange thing. We can’t understand it. In last month’s Eyrie we mentioned the enormous flood of manuscripts that daily inundates us, and now we’re going to dwell briefly on a singular phase of this sea of words—a peculiar circumstance that might profitably be studied by your sedulous student of psychology.
These manuscripts come from all parts of the civilized world, and they come from all sorts of people—lawyers, truck drivers, doctors, farmers’ wives, university professors, carpenters, high school girls, convicts, society women, drug fiends, ministers, policemen, novelists, hotel clerks and professional tramps—and one, therefore, would naturally expect their stories to possess corresponding diversity. But not so. With rare exceptions, all these stories, written by all these different kinds of people, are almost exactly alike!
Not only do they contain the same general plots and themes—one might understand that—but practically all are written in the same style; all have the same grammatical blunders, the same misspelled words, the same errors in punctuation, the same eccentric quirks of phraseology. After plowing through fifty or so of these stories (and we often read that many in an evening), a man acquires the dazed impression that all are written by the same person. It’s baffling! Why do the minds of these various types of people, living in different parts of the world and moving in dissimilar walks of life, slide comfortably into the same well-worn groove whenever they put their thoughts on paper? We give it up.
And now that we have that off our chest, we’ll talk of something less inexplicable and more delightful—namely, the Success of WEIRD TALES. That WEIRD TALES is a success there seems no gainsaying now. When we made our bow with the first issue we were hopeful, yet not certain, of a cordial reception. With the second issue, our uncertainty began to vanish. And now, with this the third number of WEIRD TALES, we can happily announce that we’re here to stay. WEIRD TALES has “caught on” even more quickly than we hoped it would. The reaction of the public indicates that a vast multitude of people had long been waiting for just this sort of magazine.
We find a like indication in the enormous number of letters from delighted readers. We expected some such response, but we scarcely hoped for this multiplicity! We’re fairly deluged with these encomiums—and a little bewildered, too, and not quite sure which ones to choose for The Eyrie and which to leave out. Perhaps, then, we’d best shut our eyes and grab a handful at random....
We open our eyes and discover this:
“Dear Sir and Friend: Many times in the past I have been tempted to write different editors, telling them how I enjoyed certain stories. But always something restrained me. As I read almost every fiction magazine published in America, you will understand how often I have wanted to compliment them.
“Last night I saw a copy of your new magazine and bought one. Although I had an early rehearsal at the theatre this morning, I started at the first story AND NEVER LAID IT DOWN UNTIL I HAD READ THE LAST LINE OF THE LAST STORY!