The Way the Future Blogs

I commissioned this illustration from Hannes Bok after seeing his work in 1939.

The Futurians had any number of members who won awards for writing, but we only had one who earned his Hugo by the beauty of the things he drew and painted. That was Wayne Woodard, as his parents called him when he was born in 1914, though he became better known to fans and to art-lovers all over the world by the name he chose for himself when he needed something to sign to his artwork, Hannes Bok.

Most magazine illustrators get their start with the magazines by visiting their offices, a bunch of samples under their arms, and showing them to whoever on the masthead would look at them until somebody showed up who liked the samples well enough to use a few in their magazines. That wasn’t possible for Hannes. He was a West Coast kid and he had no possibility of affording a bus ticket to where the magazines were. But he had a stroke of luck.

When he moved to Los Angeles — which he did early in 1939 — he met a kid fan named Raymond Bradbury — “Ray,” for short — who was almost as badly off as himself. The kid wasn’t aiming to be an artist; his dream was to become a writer, but he was as unsuccessful at it as Hannes was with his art. However. he belonged to a group of people who, like Hannes, were interested in science fiction and fantasy. The group, the Los Angeles Science Fiction League, would later become the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society. They met in an upper room of a place called Clifton’s Cafeteria.

LASFS was a welcoming group for Hannes. Among the people he met there was a writer named Emil Petaja, who did get some of his stories published in the prozines and became Hannes’ best and lifelong friend. Another was a fan, or actually a kind of superfan who knew everybody involved in making of sf films, named Forrest J (No Period!) Ackerman.

The big news in science fiction, at least as far as the LASFS was concerned, was what was going to happen in New York that summer. The city was planning a huge show called the New York World’s Fair, and the fans in New York had uncharacteristically abandoned their blood feuding to work together to create a wonderful new project, a World Science Fiction Convention. It was the chance of a lifetime, they reasoned, because they could take advantage of all the foreigners who would come to New York for the Fair. Some fraction of them, they calculated, were sure to be fans who would be likely to stay for this Worldcon.

It was every last LASFS member’s dearest dream to be among them, but for most they knew it was only a dream. The Depression was dwindling fast, but its effects were not altogether over. And LASFS was made up mainly of teenagers with few resources to draw on.

But one resource was Forry Ackerman. A small inheritance had left him with money in the bank, so he was going to the Worldcon himself. So was a female fan named Myrtle R. Jones — or, as you would say it in Forry’s favorite second tongue, Esperanto, “Morojo.” And, when Forry had had a couple weeks of exposure to the woebegone expression on Ray’s face, he figured out a way of solving one problem. He could lend Ray Bradbury the bus fare. So he tapped the bank account a little harder, and pulled out enough cash to lend Ray Bradbury the price of a ticket to New York.

That was not a risk-free investment on Forry’s part, because the only source of income Ray had to pay him back was what he earned as a newsboy, selling papers on the streets of Los Angeles. But it wasn’t just a kindness to Ray. To Forry’s generosity, Ray added on a kindness of his own. He was going to do his best to meet every sf editor in the world, or at least every one who made it to the Worldcon, and while he was introducing them to himself there was no reason — assuming Hannes would lend him some samples to take along — why he couldn’t introduce them to the work of Hannes Bok at the same time.

 
And that is how it all fell out. Ray wheeled and dealt with such good effect at the Worldcon that, if I’m not mistaken, some of Hannes’ samples were actually bought and published by an editor, and several other editors asked him to do work for them.

One of this latter class was me. I met Ray Bradbury, and heard of Hannes Bok, for the first time at (or, more accurately, near — but that’s another story) the Worldcon, and shortly thereafter commissioned a set of illustrations for a story of my own from Hannes. (I still have one of the drawings on the wall of my office at home.)

That expedition worked so well for Hannes that it gave him the funds to make the move to New York, and that too worked pretty well. Well enough, at least, for Hannes to enjoy some years of relative affluence — affluence enough, that is, for him to pay the rent and have enough left over to eat regular meals.

I think he must have been a pleasant person to be around then. Unfortunately, I wasn’t around him for most of that period, because I had received an employment offer — the kind of an offer that you just can’t say no to — from the Armed Services of the United States of America.

 
Watch for Part 2, covering how all this worked out, coming soon — provided “soon” is when I write it.

 
Related post:

• Hannes Bok, Part 2

As best I remember, Al Norton was in charge of:

• 2 air-wars
• 3 Westerns
• 2 sports
• 2 crime
• 1 sf (Super Science Stories)
• 1 superhero (G-8 and His Battle Aces)

 
At some time during my furlough, Astonishing Stories had breathed its last, done in by the 10¢ cover price. We didn’t have any horror or love pulps — happily, because we all would have hated them. We also didn’t have any of the titles Popular was acquiring in its purchase of the venerable Frank A. Munsey’s company.

As far as I recall, Popular kept only two of the Munsey titles alive: Argosy and the fantasy-reprint magazine edited by Mary Gnaedinger, Famous Fantastic Mysteries. Mary herself came with the deal — also happily, because I occasionally thus had somebody to talk science fiction with.

All of the titles we worked on were pretty much your basic pulp. The air-wars were the least interesting to work on, partly because every last word of them was written by a single author under contract, David Goodis, who was not without talent — he published better things elsewhere — but didn’t waste any of it on our pulps, which were uniformly one dogfight after another, with the Spitfires and the P-40s triumphing over the Messerschmitts and the Heinkels.

Possibly the pulpiest of our get was our one superhero: The Master American Flying Spy Known as G-8. Their main difference from the air-war titles was that G-8 was fighting in World War I, and his victories were even more improbable.

G-8 was written by a very nice man named Robert J. Hogan, and (like Goodis) he wrote the entire editorial contents of each issue, including the “readers’ letters” by and to himself. But he was — forgive me if you’re still around, Bob — by all odds the pulpiest writer we had the misfortune to edit, and when the G-8 mag got swept away by wartime stresses we all condoled with him.

He looked at us with mournful eyes, thought the matter over for a while and then said, “Well, I’ve always wanted to try magazines like The Saturday Evening Post. So I guess I’ll see if I can get any of those big slick checks.”

We were all too well brought up to hurt his feelings, so none of us laughed until he was out the door. We didn’t see him for about a month, until he stopped in on the way to the bank, so he could show us the check he had just received. For a short story. From — of course — The Saturday Evening Post.

 
Related posts:

• Popular Publications, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6

Covers were the department of Harry Steeger and Aleck Portegal, and the scene depicted almost never had anything to do with any of the issue's stories.

Al Norton’s principal editorial function was to read all the incoming pro submissions, and what few the three of us had considered possibilities from the slush pile, to pick out the ones he liked well enough to buy. Copy editing, proofreading, writing house ads and departments he left to us.

We also picked a few scenes from each story that seemed illustrative possibilities and handed copies over to Aleck Portegal, the art director — or more likely to his one and only assistant — to farm out to artists for the ten or twelve interior black-and-white drawings each issue had. What we got back from the Art Department was not only our suggestions for drawings, but both the original drawings themselves, as well as the zinc linecuts that went to the printer. (All our magazines were still printed on Mr. Gutenberg’s clever movable-type machines. The faster and easier offset presses were not yet in favor.)

Alden’s department was collectively charged with getting new issues of about a dozen magazine out in each two-month period. (Ours were all bi-monthlies, Harry Steeger being very attached to that two-month on-sale exposure. Each of the magazines came with six or seven deadlines, which meant that the three of us had some 72 separate deadlines to meet in each 60-day period. Since we didn’t work on Saturdays, Sundays or national holidays, that meant that every day of the week was usually the day when at least one deadline had to be met,

For, say, an issue to be dated August, the first deadline would come on about February 17th. That was the deadline for cover copy; on that day we had to give Al or his assistant a sheet of paper containing the best, or at last the titles that sounded best, of the stories that would be in that issue. That meant that we had to keep a record of what titles we had picked out, for it meant some embarrassments if, when we actually put the issue together out of the first proofs, we didn’t include the stories we’d listed.

Note that I didn’t list any deadlines for the actual cover paintings themselves. That’s because they weren’t our problem. Covers were the department of Harry Steeger and Aleck Portegal, and as the scene depicted almost never had anything to do with any of the issue’s stories, none of us, Alden included, had any idea of what would be on the cover until the actual printed copy was in our hands.

The second deadline would be a week later, say, February 24th. That was when typed descriptions, taken from the manuscripts themselves, of scenes for the black-and-white interior illustrations, were due to go to the Art Department.

Third deadline: March 17th: copy-edited copy of all material intended for that issue, along with all relevant line-cuts, to the printer.

First proofs of all that back about April 7th, proofread texts, organized into the actual contents for that issue, plus typed copy for house ads, departments, etc., back to printer April 14th.

Foundry proofs back May 1st; to printers May 5th.

August issue on sale June 1st.

That, remember, is for just one of the dozen or so in our department.

More to come. . . .

 
Related posts:

• Popular Publications, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 7

I was not employed by Popular Publications for five or six months, during which time I didn’t look for another job. I decided to go for full-time writing instead, but when that period was over — when I got a telegram from Al Norton, asking me to come back as his assistant, at close to twice what I’d been earning as editor of my own two magazines — I said sure.

Everything I wrote in that period sold, some of it at a word rate twice as high as my highest before then, for a total income per week of work that was actually a tad higher than I had been getting from editorial salary plus my spare-time writing. Not everything sold immediately, though, and all in all that experience validated what I had long been saying for a long time: freelancing paid pretty well, but the checks came when they came, and not a minute before. It was nothing you could finance a marriage on.

And, as it happened, my girlfriend, Doris, was getting pretty tired of being a girlfriend around that time. She much preferred the honorific “wife.” But we’ll come to that a little later.

 
Although I had been out of the office only a few months, there had been some big changes already and more were coming. Frank A. Munsey’s magazine empire, consisting mostly of the weekly Argosy and a few other odds and ends, had been up for sale for some time, and when the price declined enough to be a bargain, Harry Steeger and Harold S. Goldsmith bought Munsey’s stable.

The one magazine that they continued pretty much unchanged was Famous Fantastic Mysteries, along with its editor, Mary Gnaedinger, a friendly and able woman a little older than I, who had settled in in what had once been my office. Steeger had big plans for Argosy. He was considering making it a men’s magazine, perhaps a little like Esquire, but he was taking his time making it happen.

My biggest surprise was that Jane Littel was gone, and a middle-aged man, salvaged from Munsey’s payroll, was editing the love pulps. I never met him but he created a minor annoyance for me. He found a poem of mine in the inventory, and not having been told that it was meant to be used under a pseudonym, went ahead and published it as by Frederik Pohl.

I do not claim that my published verse would make Frost or Eliot envious, but I didn’t want to be remembered for my sappier 25¢-a-line effusions. It turned out not to matter, since apparently none of the readers of the love pulps had ever heard of me anyway.

Rog Terrill’s monkey cage of male young editors had been depleted by the draft, and Al Norton’s helpers were gone as well, every one. I never knew any of Rog’s replacements well enough to remember their names.. Al, after losing all of his, had begun to replace them with two young women. One was named Olga Mae Quadland, friendly, able and good at the obligatory skills of spelling, grammar and punctuation. The other was a very pretty recent divorcee from San Diego, in New York for the first time of her life, and, actually, the one who turned out to be my second wife.

But that’s another story, and one that we haven’t come to yet.

 
To be continued. . . .

 
Related posts:

• Popular Publications, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 6, Part 7

One of my early publishing efforts, the clubzine of the International Scientific Association, which was neither international nor scientific.

So many people were happy when I posted my piece on what it was like to work for a pulp house in the early ’40s that I decided to do the same for every publisher I worked for. That’s a fair-sized list of over a span of four decades — five if you count the fanzine publishing I started with, and I do. This is the list:

The list is only approximate, because that’s what some of my jobs were, approximate. I was never on the payroll at Ballantine, but in the course of delivering, let me see, 14 books to them over maybe a dozen years I might as well have been. (And by the way, don’t pay too much attention to the dates. I was actually editing Galaxy for close to ten years before I put my name on the masthead because I thought, or hoped, that Horace would recover from his medical problems and come back. And I wasn’t with Ace for a full year. It was maybe seven months before I just couldn’t stand it any longer.)

 
Related posts:

• How to Publish a Fanzine
• Popular Publications, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7
• My Life as Book Editor for Popular Science
• Future posts to come

 

After the war — that’s World War II, I’m talking about, what did you think? — I went to work as copywriter for a tiny Mad Ave. advertising agency called Thwing & Altman. It wasn’t a boring job, and one of the things I liked about it was that one of my favorite over-the-top novelists, Tiffany Thayer, was among my predecessors in holding it. But I turned out to be good at that kind of work, and they weren’t paying me particularly well, so before long I was studying the Help Wanted pages in the Times again.

It was still a boom time for the unemployed. Jobs were begging for people to fill them as America got back in the business of business. There was one particular listing which seemed to be addressed to me almost by name — I no longer remember what it was in the specifications that seemed to bear my initials, but the moment I saw the ad I lusted for it. The ad had been placed by an employment agency, so I called them up, made an appointment, sneaked out of the office with some of my roughs under my arm and laid them proudly before the man who had agreed to see me.

“Um,” he said. “Not too bad. Have you made a resume?” Of course I had, but when I handed it to him he looked puzzled. He gave me a dubious glance, studied the resume one more time and then said, “It doesn’t name the college you went to.”

At times in the past I had wondered if that question might ever handicap me in my chosen career. But no one who ever hired me for anything had ever asked about it before, so his comment rather surprised me. “Óh,” I said, “I never went to a college. I dropped out of high school as soon as I was seventeen.”

That got a reaction out of him. He gave me a scowl of repugnance, stuffed all my papers back into their folder and said, “You’ve wasted my time. This is a good job with a very important publishing company. Naturally they’re not going to hire anyone without at least a bachelor’s degree.” And I crept out of his office in humility, hardly daring to look at even the receptionist out of my high-school-dropout eyes.

But the ad was still in the paper on the next Sunday, as well as the as the Sunday after that. Moreover, although there were plenty of other jobs on offer, there weren’t any that seemed to be calling me by name, so I got back on the phone. “I called,” I said, after identifying myself and feeling the temperature drop when I did, “because I noticed that ad was still running, and I wondered — ”

“Mr. Pohl,” he said severely, “I told you that you’re simply not qualified for a job of this caliber. If anything comes up that might suit you I’ll keep you in mind. Goodbye.”

I hung up, meditating violence. But time passed and I cooled down. And, more important, the ad continued to run. So a few weeks later I called again. My account executive was beginning to sound tired of the subject, but he admitted they had run out of candidates. “All right,” he said. “I don’t suppose it would hurt anything if I let you try your luck. It’s the Popular Science Publishing Company, on Fourth Avenue around 28th Street. The man you want to see is their advertising director for circulation and books, and his name is George Spoerer. I’ll give him a call to say you’re coming — ”

“Well, no,” I said. “Let’s not do that. I’ll call him for an appointment myself. And, don’t worry, I won’t forget about your commission on my first week’s salary.”

I had been worrying a little myself about what this hard to please Mr. Spoerer might be like, but on the phone he sounded like a reasonable human being and when I got to his office he looked and acted that way too. Not only that, but, when I showed him some of the house ads I’d written at Popular Publications, he revealed himself as at least a part-time science-fiction fan. And when George Spoerer had decided I could do the job he walked me into the office of his boss, the Circulation Manager of the company, Eugene Watson, and he wasn’t bad either. And twenty minutes later I had the job.

I didn’t know how my account executive at the employment agency would take that news. When I phoned he just sighed a long sigh and began reminding me that, under New York law, their commission was a collectible debt and they would expect weekly checks from me until it was paid off. “All right,” I said, and hung up.”

I had intended at least to say “thank you,” but it no longer sounded appropriate.

 
I forgot to mention that, as I was leaving, George said, “Did I tell you about your other jobs?” And when I said an apprehensive no he said, “Don’t look so apprehensive. One is Subscription Fulfillment Manager, and all that requires is that you let Old Jim tell you what’s going on in that department so you can answer any questions the higher brass might ask. That’s where we have twenty-five young girls to type out the addressograph stencils that make labels for subscribers. Old Jim is the actual boss of the department because he’s too old and too religious to cause any trouble with those twenty-five young girls. But he’s hopeless when he tries to talk to a vice president.”

As I had never talked to a corporate vice president myself I crossed my fingers and went on to the next point. “And the other job?”

“That’s no sweat, too. The title is Book Editor for books published by our two magazines, Popular Science and Outdoor Life. We make a good thing out of mail-order books for home handymen and sport fishers. Since the magazines buy all rights we take material that appears in the magazines and retread it for how-to books.

“You don’t do that work yourself, of course. You hire an editor to do it, and you just make sure it’s done right — I’ll show you how it’s done over the table at the Gramercy Park, if you’ll have lunch with me on Monday.”

“A week from Monday, if you don’t mind,” I said. “I’d like to give Mr. Altman a little notice.” And a week from Monday it was.

Continue reading ‘My Life as Book Editor for Popular Science’ »