FFM: Fritz Leiber, Jody Scott, James Sallis; Gary Jennings, Josephine Saxton, Samuel Delany, Judith Merril and Gahan Wilson; Ramsey Campbell, Robert Lowndes and Seabury Quinn: blue covers for some winter/spring fantasy magazines: FANTASTIC, February 1969, edited by Barry N. Malzberg; THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION, February 1969, edited by Edward L. Ferman; STARTLING MYSTERY STORIES, Summer 1969, edited by Robert A. W. Lowndes

Three magazine issues, with blue covers. Why care about these first 1969 issues (even the January issue of F&SF would've been on the stands for Xmas '68) from these titles? Some impressive writers whose names you might be able to, and definitely cannot, make out on these covers:

Fantastic: Among the contributors of new fiction, Fritz Leiber, of course, but also James Sallis, Jody Scott, Pg Wyal (his first story), Robert Hoskins and others.

F&SF: Josephine Saxton, but also Gary Jennings (before the best-sellers such as Aztec), Samuel Delany (at this point the film columnist, even as the books are handled by Judith Merril and a set of Gahan Wilson's occasional horror/dark fantasy reviews, along with Wilson's cartoon and Asimov's pop-science essay), a recent translation of Yevgeny Zamyatin and another reprint, from (eventually) mostly tv-writer/producer Larry Brody.

SMS: The magazine which "discovered" Stephen King and F. Paul Wilson features in this issue original work by Ramsey Campbell, along with debut stories by the not so prolific Donna Gould Welk and Ken Porter, interspersed with reprints.

There were more fantasy-fiction magazines publishing in the US than usual in 1969, not least because Sol Cohen, who'd left the Galaxy Magazine Group to buy Fantastic and Amazing from Ziff-Davis in 1965, and with the magazines he'd bought the unlimited serial (magazine) reprint rights to all the stories Ziff-Davis had purchased as a default for their magazine fiction since the late 1930s...as well as the legacy copyrights from earlier publishers of Amazing...Cohen was at the height of his issuing reprint magazines filled with fiction he didn't legally need to pay any royalties for, and a few of those titles he slanted toward fantasy fiction. Strange Fantasy was the first and the best of these (bettered only by a much later one-shot Sword and Sorcery Annual), and took over the volume and issue numbering for two years from Science Fiction Classics beginning in '69. Robert A. W. Lowndes added Weird Terror Tales to his growing line of no-budget, mostly-reprint magazines in '69 (Bizarre Fantasy Tales would begin its brief run in 1970); Arthur Landis got his new digest Coven 13 onto some newsstands, and while Joseph Payne Brennan produced no issue of his boutique project Macabre in '69 (and Lester del Rey's fully professional Worlds of Fantasy offered one issue each in 1968 and 1970 but none in '69), there was a second issue of W. Paul Ganley's Weirdbook among the little or semipro magazines, even if no others offering as impressive a set of contributors of fiction. But aside from Lowndes's Magazine of Horror, the elder sibling to the more psychic-detective- and borderline horror/suspense-oriented SMS, whose March 1969 issue I don't have to hand (it does contain a new R. A. Lafferty story, however) and which doesn't even have a blue cover (the nerve), the three most visible US fantasy-fiction magazines in early '69 were the three I discuss below.

Barry Malzberg was never too happy during his short term as editor of the Cohen/Ultimate Publications versions of Fantastic and Amazing, though he had managed to get his last issue of Fantastic, this February issue, about half full of original fiction (and the balance an odd mix of relatively random 1950s reprints, including one story each from Clifford Simak, Kendell Crossen and the house
the second issue
name "Lawrence Chandler," who could've been in this case nearly anyone in a small stable of regular contributors, including founding editor Howard Browne). In fact, the precipitating argument that ended Barry's employment was over whether cover artist William Baker would be paid for his cover image, a not-extraordinarily good nor bad pastel that Cohen apparently hated (and not notably worse, I'd suggest, than the other minor work on the other covers). With the inclusion of Robert Silverberg's essay (though Silverberg had been a columnist for Amazing as edited by Cele Goldsmith Lalli at Ziff-Davis), and fiction by such Malzberg favorites as (Ms.) Jody Scott and Robert Hoskins, Barry was clearly already starting to make his mark on the magazine, even if he wouldn't have much chance to do much more; Ted White would be installed as the new editor with the next issue, and Barry's inventory was probably exhausted with Ted's first issues of the two magazines. Poet Margo Skinner, Leiber's good friend after the death of his wife, wrote two of the reviews without credit in the table of contents, but a byline on the text. Barry's headnotes and "coming next month" are full of praise for the contributors, aside from the diffidence he employs in introducing his own work.

Edward Ferman and his family business (his father, Joseph Ferman, would still be publishing the magazine for the next few years) were readying themselves for the release of the revival of Venture Science Fiction, which would begin with an issue cover-dated May 1969. (Another, shorter-lived project, a magazine about proto-New Age matters, Inner Space, would soon follow.) However unkind fate might be to their other publications, F&SF continued to steadily appear on a monthly basis, and while it didn't have the kind of financial support Analog (as a publication of Condé Nast) had, it faced less instability than any of the other magazines in the fantastic-fiction field; the monetary inflation of the Nixon era, very much including that faced by publishers specifically in terms of paper and postage among other expenses, helped doom both the other titles, however. This is a solid issue of the magazine, featuring a lead novella by the somewhat underrated James Schmitz, who nonetheless had allowed his fiction to fall into a bit of a rut by this point in his career, and featuring such F&SF frequent or at least repeat contributors as Gary Jennings, who published a string of short stories with the magazine in the 1960s and '70s well before becoming a bestselling novelist and for a while after; that only his series of Crispin Mobey stories from the magazine have

been collected (and they published under a pseudonym in book form as if a novel) is an odd sort of oversight, even if they might not appeal so readily to his novels' larger audience, and Vance Aandahl, Josephine Saxton, Doris Pitkin Buck (with a rather slight bit of verse, not one of the stronger poems she'd publish with the magazine), and Patrick Meadows (who like Schmitz came to F&SF from Analog, but Meadows only published a single story in John Campbell's magazine before placing a handful with Ferman over a short period). F&SF, like Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine on which it was modeled, was never afraid to include interesting reprints, and this issue includes two from rather different sources: television writer Larry Brody provides a fantasticated spy story, reprinted from 1967 first issue of the comics fanzine Gosh! Wow! (both the story and the fanzine won Alley Awards for that year, then the comics equivalent of a Hugo Award)(Ferman notes a weakness for this kind of thing, and the previous Xmas issue had featured Harlan Ellison's send-up "Santa Claus vs. S.P.I.D.E.R."; Delany's review column is devoted to the film of Barbarella), and the enormously influential Soviet dissident writer Yevgeny Zamyatin's 1920 story "The Cave" is offered in a 1968 translation by consistent 1960s translator Mirra Ginsburg, with an introduction by Sam Moskowitz. It's notable that both Fritz Leiber, in the

Maybe the best # of this Ultimate
title, thanks to the Bloch reprint.
Fantastic, and Judith Merril have engaging takes on Clifford Simak's science-fantasy novel The Goblin Reservation in these issues; Samuel Delany's film column for the magazine was sadly short-lived, and their first since Charles Beaumont had conducted one in the late 1950s (with "William Morrison"/Joseph Samachson contributing a more occasional column on stage drama alongside Beaumont's); radio dramatist and bookseller Baird Searles would soon follow Delany at the magazine for more than a decade, and be succeeded by Harlan Ellison, Kathi Maio and Lucius Shepard, sometimes in alternation. Gahan Wilson's cartoon was already a regular feature, one of Ferman's first innovations in the magazine, and it would appear in every issue till the two had some sort of falling-out in the early '80s...only Isaac Asimov, with his science column, was a more durable regular than Wilson and his cartoons in the magazine's history.

If Fantastic in those years had relatively randomly-selected reprints, and F&SF rather more carefully-chosen ones that usually ran to relatively recent but (to most fantasy/sf readers, probably) obscure sources, Robert A. W. Lowndes's magazines for the very marginal Health Knowledge Publications managed to get by through Lowndes combing through his collection of pulps and anthologies and collections of fantasy and other sorts of fiction, looking for public-domain items of various sorts and checking with the Copyright Office for records of renewals on the pulp items, often taken from such orphaned magazines as Strange Tales.

The Magazine of Horror was the first of the fiction magazines Lowndes was able to launch at HK, which was mostly in the business of publishing imitations of the magazine Sexology and the like (after HK collapsed in 1971, Lowndes would be hired at that magazine, at Gernsback Publications). Startling Mystery Stories and Famous Science Fiction followed, and a small slew of others followed those, before the collapse...what distinguished SMS from its elder sibling, as noted above, was that it was devoted more to psychic detective stories, such as those of Seabury Quinn, once the most popular contributor to Weird Tales (outpacing the likes of H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith and Edmond Hamilton by some distance during Farnsworth Wright's editorship), who retained quite a following among the more nostalgic readership of the MOH; SMS not only served as outlet for Quinn stories, so that not so many need appear in the elder magazine, but also served as a place to run stories by horror fiction aspirants whose work wasn't Quite what Lowndes wanted
Lowndes's '69 3rd fantasy title.
for the mothership title (hence the "first stories" by King and Wilson appearing in Startling Mystery rather than Horror; Terry Carr and Ted White's somewhat surreal "The Secret of the City" had appeared in an earlier issue). But aside from some engaging pulp (and earlier p.d. fiction) reprints, some first-rate originals appeared in SMS, as well, including this issue's "The Scar," one of the better early Ramsey Campbell short stories, marking his beginning to take on his own voice and becoming somewhat less simply a promising acolyte of H. P. Lovecraft, and one of August Derleth's most treasured discoveries thus. Much of the issue, as in part with all Lowndes magazines going back through the not quite as low-budget but still low-budget Columbia fiction-magazine days, was devoted to a long editorial (in this issue discussing Poe's contribution to mystery fiction, sparked in part by an article in an early issue of The Armchair Detective), a bibliography of Quinn's Jules de Grandin stories, a Lowndes book and magazine review piece, and a long letter column (free copy, aside from the time spent transcribing letters and answering them).

The ISFDB indices to these issues, slightly corrected:

Publication: Fantastic, February 1969
(View All Issues) (View Issue Grid)
Editor: Barry N. Malzberg
Year: 1969-02-00
Publisher: Ultimate Publishing Co., Inc.
Price: $0.50
Pages: 148
Binding: digest
Type: MAGAZINE
Title Reference: Fantastic - 1969
Cover: Wm. Baker (aka Bill Baker, as below)
4 • Editorial: Diversity in Science Fiction • essay by Robert Silverberg
6 • Richmond, Late September • shortstory by Fritz Leiber (variant of Richmond, Late September, 1849)
7 • Richmond, Late September • interior artwork by Bill Baker
17 • Any Heads at Home • shortstory by David R. Bunch
20 • Bathe Your Bearings in Blood! • (1950) • shortstory by Clifford D. Simak (variant of Skirmish) Amazing Stories Dec 1950
20 • Bathe Your Bearings in Blood! • (1950) • interior artwork by Leo Summers
36 • All in the Game • shortstory by Edward Y. Breese
42 • The Castle on the Crag • shortstory by Pg Wyal [as by P. G. Wyal]
45 • The Major Incitement to Riot • shortstory by Barry N. Malzberg [as by K. M. O'Donnell]
49 • The Life of the Stripe • shortstory by Piers Anthony
52 • Slice of Universe • shortstory by James Sallis [as by James R. Sallis ]
55 • Reason for Honor • shortstory by Robert Hoskins
59 • The Closed Door • (1953) • shortstory by Kendell Foster Crossen [as by Kendall Foster Crossen] Amazing Stories Aug/Sep 1953
63 • The Closed Door • (1953) • interior artwork by uncredited
77 • The Origin of Species • shortstory by Jody Scott [as by Jody Scott Wood]
78 • Grounds for Divorce • shortstory by Robert S. Phillips
81 • This Planet for Sale • (1952) • novelette by Ralph Sholto Fantastic Adventures Jul 1952
81 • This Planet for Sale • (1952) • interior artwork by Paul Lundy
109 • The Day After Eternity • (1955) • novelette by unknown [as by Lawrence Chandler] Fantastic Feb 1955
110 • The Day After Eternity • (1955) • interior artwork by Ernie Barth
142 • Fantasy Books (Fantastic, February 1969) • [Fantasy Books (Fantastic)] • essay by Fritz Leiber
142 • Review: The Goblin Reservation by Clifford D. Simak • review by Fritz Leiber
143 • Review: The Crystal World by J. G. Ballard • review by Fritz Leiber
143 • Review: October the First Is Too Late by Fred Hoyle • review by Fritz Leiber
144 • Review: Restoree by Anne McCaffrey • review by Margo Skinner
145 • Review: Pity About Earth by Ernest Hill • review by Margo Skinner

the first issue, 1969

Publication: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, February 1969
(View All Issues) (View Issue Grid)
Editor: Edward L. Ferman
Year: 1969-02-00
Publisher: Mercury Press, Inc.
Price: $0.50
Pages: 132
Binding: digest
Type: MAGAZINE
Title Reference: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction - 1969
Cover: Russell FitzGerald
5 • Attitudes • [The Hub] • novelette by James H. Schmitz
22 • Books (F&SF, February 1969) • [Books (F&SF)] • essay by Judith Merril and Gahan Wilson
22 • Review: Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner • review by Judith Merril
22 • Review: The Two-Timers by Bob Shaw • review by Judith Merril
22 • Review: Isle of the Dead by Roger Zelazny • review by Judith Merril
23 • Review: The Goblin Reservation by Clifford D. Simak • review by Judith Merril
26 • Review: Selected Letters, 1911-1924 by H. P. Lovecraft • review by Gahan Wilson
26 • Review: Selected Letters, 1925-1929 by H. P. Lovecraft • review by Gahan Wilson
27 • Review: Ghosts in Irish Houses by James Reynolds • review by Gahan Wilson
28 • Cartoon: "In Here." • interior artwork by Gahan Wilson
29 • The Cave (Introduction) • essay by Sam Moskowitz
31 • The Cave • shortstory by Yevgeny Zamyatin (trans. of Пещера 1920 by Mirra Ginsburg) reprinted from The Dragon, Random House 1968; translated from the Russian (1922) [note date discrepancy between ISFDB and the FictionMags Index]
40 • Nightwalker • (Gosh! Wow! #1 1967) • shortstory by Larry Brody
53 • Films: Barbarella • [Films (F&SF)] • essay by Samuel R. Delany
54 • Dormant Soul • shortstory by Josephine Saxton
70 • Drool • shortstory by Vance Aandahl
73 • Twin Sisters • poem by Doris Pitkin Buck
74 • Pater One Pater Two • novelette by Patrick Meadows
104 • Uncertain, Coy, and Hard to Please • [Asimov's Essays: F&SF] • essay by Isaac Asimov
116 • After All the Dreaming Ends • shortstory by Gary Jennings

the 2nd, and only 1969, issue

Publication: Startling Mystery Stories, Summer 1969
(View All Issues) (View Issue Grid)
Editor: Robert A. W. Lowndes
Year: 1969-00-00
Publisher: Health Knowledge, Inc.
Price: $0.50
Pages: 134
Binding: digest
Type: MAGAZINE
Title Reference: Startling Mystery Stories - 1969
Cover: Richard Schmand
4 • The Editor's Page (Startling Mystery Stories, Summer 1969) • essay by Robert A. W. Lowndes
8 • The Gray Killer • (Weird Tales, November 1929) • novelette by Everil Worrell
31 • The Scar • shortstory by Ramsey Campbell [as by J. Ramsey Campbell ]
46 • Where There's Smoke • shortstory by Donna Gould Welk
52 • Ancient Fires • [Jules de Grandin] • (Weird Tales, September 1926) • novelette by Seabury Quinn
76 • The Cases of Jules de Grandin: A Chronological Listing, Part 1 • essay by Robert A. W. Lowndes
84 • The Hansom Cab • shortstory by Ken Porter
90 • Inquisitions (Startling Mystery Stories, Summer 1969) • essay by Robert A. W. Lowndes
90 • Review: Mr. Fairlee's Final Journey by August Derleth (Mycroft & Moran 1968) • review by Robert A. W. Lowndes
91 • Review: The Man with the Watches and The Lost Special by Arthur Conan Doyle (Luther Norris 1969?) • review by Robert A. W. Lowndes
92 • Review: The Baker Street Journal edited by Julian Wolff • review by Robert A. W. Lowndes
92 • Review: The Armchair Detective edited by Allen J. Hubin • review by Robert A. W. Lowndes
93 • Review: The Rohmer Review edited by Douglas Rossman • review by Robert A. W. Lowndes
94 • The Veil of Tanit • (Strange Tales, March 1932) • novelette by Eugene de Reszke [as by Eugene de Rezske ]
113 • The Cauldron (Startling Mystery Stories, Summer 1969) • letter co;umm by various (Stuart David Schiff, Luther Norris, Roger Vanous and others)

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