The Way the Future Blogs

Popular Publications ’ Super Science Stories, No. 1 &mash; yours truly, Editor.

If you made a right turn at Jane Littell’s door you found yourself in the business wing of the company’s offices, where people took care of distribution, billing, advertising and all the other grubbier parts of the publishing business. At least I suppose that’s what they did. In the four years I worked for Popular Publications I never once went there. Turn to the left. though, and you were at the pulsing heart of the pulp-paper experience.

Turning that way meant you were then heading north, paralleling the adjacent East River. On your right would be an expanse of blank wall, then two sets of office doors, then another several yards of blank walls before you came to any normal-sized office. At that point you would have passed the two king-sized offices that were the private lairs of the two makers and shakers who owned and ran Popular Publications, Harold S. Goldsmith and Harry Steeger.

What, exactly, either of them did in their throne rooms each day I can’t imagine. I am quite sure that neither of them read any appreciable number of the stories their editors bought.

Goldsmith did sign checks, I knew, but that accounted for no more than twenty or thirty minutes a week. Steeger. I thought, did carry a heavier burden, mostly because he had decreed that he personally had to approve every last cover of every painting of a cover for any of the Popular magazines before it went to the photo-engraver. (“My theory,” he told me, “is that if I just okayed covers I personally liked sooner or later I would attract enough people who agreed with me for the covers to work.” Probably it did. He never changed his tastes, and over a period of some twenty years his pulps kept returning a profit.)

The other thing that I know Steeger’s office to have been used for was conferences with his editors, generally to tell them that their newsstand sales figures were unsatisfactory and to discuss what to do about it. (Which was usually to fire the editor and give the work to someone else. Or, alternatively, to give the editor under discussion a little more money, in salary or budget — or both — in the hope that that will encourage him to make the magazine better. I had all three types of meetings with him at one time or another.)

 
Next, heading northward from the executive offices on that arm of the T, was an office intermediate in size between the White-Pohl-Littell cubbyholes and the grand palaces of Steeger and Goldsmith. This one was the property of Rogers Terrill. Rog’s official title was Editor in Chief, Popular Publications, but actually he had little to do — in a day-to-day sense, almost nothing — with any of the publications I’ve mentioned so far.

My belief is that Rogers Terrill had at one time been much more important in shaping Harry Steeger’s policies than he had become by 1939, when I went to work for Popular Publications … and Harry Steeger had gained a little more self-confidence. (A few years later when White, too, was history, some say that Steeger edited a few manuscripts, anonymously, himself.)

Then, the office next to Terrill’s and the one at the end of the line on the south side of the corridor, belonged to Alden H. Norton, whose work was similar to Terrill’s: both of them had somewhat larger spaces than the rest of us — and needed the space, because they each had a secretary sharing the rooms.

Both of them, in fact, more or less ran their own publishing companies, with ten or fifteen magazines each to get out. They could not, of course, do that by themselves. So they each had a large nearby office packed with three or four junior editors, who did all the scut work: copy-editing the ms, proofreading the two sets of proof for each magazines, writing house ads and features … yes, and reading the slush.

Come back for the story, which we’ll publish as soon as I write it.

 
Related posts:

• Popular Publications, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7

Jane Littell edited Popular Publications’ romance pulps.

The thing to remember about those pulp magazines of the 1920s and ’30s is that, with a few exceptions, the stories behind the lurid covers didn’t have to be any good. Not in any literary sense, at least — the average story in a pulp magazine was about as mindless as daytime television, if not more so. (Daytime TV at least provides weather reports and stock quotations.)

Curiously, however, in terms of spelling, punctuation and grammar, pulp editors were supposed to be almost as irreproachable as the New York Times, and actually came fairly close. Better than the average American college graduate, anyway. Even the writers, on average, were reasonably good at such matters., though the actual stories they framed in these grammatical and well spelled terms came about as close to mindless as any literature ever can.

You will remember, though, that I mentioned honorable exceptions to the rule of pure trash, and there were some. One was the crime pulp Black Mask, edited by Ken White from the cubicle next to my own.

Well, let’s slow down a moment here so I can paint you a word picture. The entire suite of Popular Publications’ offices on the top, or 20th, floor of the structure called the Bartholomew Building was in the approximate shape of a capital letter T, which someone had pushed over so it was lying on its side. The down stroke of the T, which now ran east and west, was shortened, leaving on one side just room for three small offices and on the other side the wall that kept visitors penned in the waiting room until our receptionist-switchboard girl, Ethel Klock, said they could go on in. The cross-stroke of the T, now running north and south and thus paralleling the nearby East River, housed all the rest of Popular’s employees except for the two on the (former) downstroke, which is to say Ken White, with his Black Mask, and me. (I believe a deceased pulp called Railroad Stories had once been edited from the now-vacant third of those downstroke offices.)

Although Ken White was my nearest neighbor, we seldom spoke. He was rarely in his office, apparently doing most of his work at home. He was, I believe, the magazine’s third working editor, and he was charged with keeping the magazine as outstanding for quality and innovation as it had been made by his predecessors. That was no light responsibility. Black Mask had been started by the team of H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan as publishers, and they had turned it over to “Cap” Joseph Shaw to edit. Shaw had done wonders, recruiting writers like Dashiell Hammet and Raymond Chandler to reinvent the crime story for him. Unfortunately for Ken White, those two were no longer pounding the typewriter keys to fill the pulps, so it was a tough assignment.

White and I had the only offices in use on that abbreviated leg of the lazy-T. Everything else was on the T’s crossbar. Backtracking to where the crossbar of the T sat on the stumpy vertical, there was the office of Jane Littell, who edited Popular’s love pulps.

Janie had a background she didn’t much care to talk about, including a stint — before she began to put on the pounds — as a circus performer. She would never get explicit about it but I formed the opinion that she had been an equestrienne, one of those fearless young women who circled the ring standing on the back of a galloping horse.

Continue reading ‘Popular Publications, Part 3:
The People Who Made the Pulps’ »

205 East 42nd Street, erstwhile headquarters of Popular Publications.

 
What a Major Pulp House Was Like in 1939

Harry Steeger didn’t take me into his confidence about his reasons for adding fifteen or twenty new half-cent-a-word titles to his existing string of twenty or thirty penny-a-word pulps, but I can see what he might have been thinking. At a penny a word, the average pulp cost about $600 an issue for stories. Cut the pay to a half cent and you’ve cut the cost of each issue by $300 — meaning, if you can keep the newsstand sales at the same figure, there will be $300 more of profit each month for each magazine.

Actually there will be more profit than that, because Steeger didn’t go to the extravagance of hiring editors for each of the new magazines. He simply told his existing editors that they would be producing a new magazine as well as the old.

In fact he went to some trouble, I really don’t know why, to conceal that fact in each new Western, air-war, sports or crime magazine. Each one came with the made-up name of an “editor” in the lists that went to the writers’ magazines. Al Norton might have been handed the new half-cent Battle Birds to produce, along with his existing air-war Fighting Aces, but the writers were informed the half-cent’s editor was someone named Archie Bentwhistle.

This made some problems when a writer came looking for, or trying to phone, the nonexistent Archie. Our receptionist/switchboard girl, Thel Klock, was instructed to tell all such troublemakers that Mr. Bentwhistle’s wife was very ill and he hadn’t been in the office for several days, and in fact she had no idea when he would be in again. However, she was instructed to tell the troublemaker, she could connect him with Bentwhistle’s trusted, associate — fill in the name of the actual editor — who was taking over some of his work while he was out, and might be able to help the visitor.

Steeger’s little deceptions were helped along by an oddity in Popular Publications’ street address. The building (of which Popular occupied most of the top floor, and indeed at a later date added on a penthouse for more office space) was located at 205 East 42nd Street in New York City. However, it was a pretty good-sized building. The entrance lobby went right through the block to a second entrance at 210 East 43rd Street, which address Steeger seized on to become the address on the new publishing company of Fictioneers, Inc., into which he swept all the new half-cent magazines.

I don’t know who was fooled by all this. Not many people, I suspect, or at least not for long. The myth of a separate company with different but real human editors was allowed to expire. And I think most of the half-cent magazines were allowed to continue, side by side with the elite penny-a-worders, returning their better profit margins to the two men, Harry Steeger (for editorial) and Harold S. Goldsmith (for business), who owned the company … at least until the grinding pressures of World War II began condemning so many of the pulps to extinction.

 
More on this subject soon, that is, if I find time soon to write it.
 
Related posts:

• Popular Publications, Part 1, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7

Harry Steeger

In the late 1930s, I was a teenage science-fiction fan and would-be writer. I had come to know a number of editors of the existing science-fiction pulps by reinventing myself as a literary agent and visiting them at their offices, offering them the latest stories written by some of my fan friends. The writers were pretty amateurish and my sales of them around zero. Still, the deception wasn’t entirely implausible. A couple dozen of us would-bes had formed ourselves into a fan club called The Futurians. Drawn from that pool, some of my clients were Cyril Kornbluth, Don Wollheim and Isaac Asimov, and they were all already coming fairly close. Close enough, at least, to be taken at least slightly seriously by the editors.

What I noticed about the editors was that they spent much of their time reading science fiction. Well, that’s what I was doing, too, only I was doing it for nothing. I summoned up the nerve to ask one of the friendlier editors, Robert Erisman, if he would like to hire me as an assistant. He didn’t laugh at me. He didn’t even tell me what I am sure was true, that he didn’t have a budget for an assistant or any hope of being given one. But he did tell me that he had heard that some new magazines were coming out from Harry Steeger of Popular Publications, way at the far end of 42nd Street (Erisman’s office was almost as far west as you could go on 42nd Street, in the old green glass McGraw-Hill Building, while Steeger’s, between 2nd and 3rd Avenues, was almost as far as you could go east — that is, in either case, without running into a river.). So why didn’t I, then, go see Mr. Steeger and see if he might hire me to edit a science-fiction magazine for him?

So I did, and, wonder of wonders, Mr. Steeger did. He said I could start right away. He cautioned me that these new magazines he was adding would be paying only a half-cent a word, instead of the traditional pulp penny, and to be consistent, all he could pay an editor for them, like me, was $10 a week, which even in 1939 was starvation wages. (I learned later that I wasn’t even the worst-paid of his new hirees. A young man named Costa Carousso was hired at about the same time, and his deal was that he would be paid nothing for his first three months and then raised to $10 a week. Curiously when Carousso, like me, got swept up into the Air Force a couple of years later, they turned us both into weathermen.)

What he didn’t tell me, but I found out for myself soon enough, was that none of the editors got paid very much, but were all expected to write enough stories for themselves to add up to a passably almost decent income. I volunteered the information that I would prefer to do my own typing and there, too, he managed not to laugh in my face, since that was what all the editors did. He simply walked into an unused office, poached a typewriter off its desk, carried it a few yards down the stem of the great T the offices were laid out in, set it down on that desk and said, “This will be your office. My secretary, Peggy Graves, will come to see you tomorrow and answer any questions you may have, Good luck.” And he walked back to his own office, leaving me to enjoy my very own desk, in my very own office in my very own employer’s publishing company.

Would you believe it, I was 19 years old and actually a professional editor.

(There is one memory from that day that still rankles a bit. All this had taken place on a Thursday, almost all of which I spent in the Popular office. The next day was Friday, which I spent working there. When, the following Friday, Peggy marched through the offices, depositing a paycheck on everyone’s desk, mine was for the five days of that week, with nothing for the Friday and most of Thursday of the week preceding. I contend that I am owed 1-1/2 days pay, or $3, for that week, that I have been owed it now for the better part of a century, and that the debt should have been earning, and compounding, interest all these years. Only I don’t know who to send the bill to.)

 
More to come.

 
Related posts:

• Popular Publications, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7

Robert Silverberg and Karen Haber, 2009. (Photo by Cat Sparx.)

From time to time, Robert Silverberg has told the world that he had written himself out and was retiring from the field. Fortunately for the rest of us, these periods of abstinence from the computer were so depressing to his irrepressibly auctorial psyche that he fled back to the keyboard before long each time. Now he maintains a delicate balance between time spent in putting words on paper, as it seems God has intended for him to do, and time spent traveling the world to view art treasures in the greatest museums and the tiniest of ancient churches.

Betty Anne and I were lucky enough to join him once or twice when we found ourselves inhabiting the same land mass at a convenient time. One such episode that sticks in my mind took place in Italy in 1989. Bob with his wife, Karen Haber, and I with my own, Elizabeth Anne Hull — the wives both had elected to keep their maiden names, which tells you something about them, but at least they didn’t make us take theirs — had been attending a World SF annual meeting in a little town, up in the mountains, called Fanano.

The meeting had been good. World SF had been started by a few of us in order to give sf writers in every country that possessed any examples of any such native creatures a chance to interact with the major writers and editors of the world, and it had come to function very effectively, especially in helping writers from travel-restricting countries get permission to join us. The Fanano meeting had people from all over Europe, including a couple of groups from the USSR, as well as people from several countries in Asia and, of course, a large contingent from North America.

When it was over, Bob wanted to visit a bunch of old churches along the Adriatic on the way north to Venice, and Betty and I volunteered to go along with him.

I can’t say that I have a compelling interest in old churches. I do like to wander around new places, though, so Betty and the Silverbergs parked near a church and I went off to explore. I did peer into one or two churches that might have been where Princess Mathaswentha was saved from a loveless marriage by Martin Padway (at least, she was in L. Sprague de Camp’s Lest Darkness Fall, though in the real world she was less fortunate). But really, after a week of concentrated good fellowship with friends from all over the world I was content with peace and quiet.

Venice, of course, was something else. None of the four of us had been there before, though I had barely missed it once when driving from Trieste down along the (then Yugoslavian, now multinational) coast to the Ancona ferry. And Venice itself was a constant delight.

We had pretty much lost any detailed contact with the world we usually lived in, not having any English-language newspaper or TV handy, but more language-gifted friends in Fanano had told us about big trouble in China. Something was going on in Tianenmen Square, the big open space in Beijing usually given over to crowds of young people anxious to try their imperfect English — or their teacher’s — on us so we could help improve their accents. No crowds of happy youngsters were there now, and no tourists. What young people there were were staring down the barrels of Chinese tanks, and the tank captains — we heard when we found an English paper — were said to have their fingers on the triggers.

It was at that point that we ran across a couple of old friends who, like us, had been at the World SF meeting in Fanano and decided to add on a little Adriatic exploration.

Takumi and Sashiko Shibano, from Tokyo, had been doing the Worldcon for years, and once or twice had stayed with us for a day or two before the con. Yang Xiao, from Chengdu in China, was the editor of the very successful Science Fiction World, by far China’s most prestigious sf magazine. Not one of them spoke a single word of Italian, so they had banded together to do their exploration, in spite of the fact that Yang didn’t speak either Japanese or English, either, and the Shibanos had no Chinese. At home in Chengdu, Yang Xiao didn’t need to know languages, having a staff of translators to keep her informed of what was in all those articles, stories and letters, but they were all still in Chengdu, while she was a world away. A clearly courageous human being, Yang had done all sorts of world traveling, with no more English than you can get out of a Chinese-Engish “useful words” booklet.

I admired her pluck, but immediately discovered she had heard nothing about the drama being played out in Tiananmen Square. I began to worry about how to inform her of the problem that looked like it was convulsing her home country.. We all put our minds to it. We succceded, too. Our American team went over the principal stories about Tiananmen Square in the English and Italian papers to clarify any parts that the Shibanos were unsure of. Then either Takumi or Sashiko wrote each story out in Japanese characters. It is a fortunate quality of the two languages that, although the spoken tongues are mutually incomprehensible, the written ones are enough alike that, with some effort, a Chinese reader can make sense of a Japanese story. And Yang Xiao got the news of the dismal encounter that was shaking her homeland up while she was a world away.

Which just goes to show you what a bunch of science-fiction types can do when they put their minds to it.

Robert Silverberg, me and Betty Anne at ConJose in 2002. (Photo by Laurie D.T. Mann.)

Robert Silverberg has been a good friend for a pile of years, but “good friend” doesn’t quite describe some of the more disconcerting parts of our friendship.

Along about the early 1960s, while I was just getting comfortable as the new editor of Galaxy and its companions, Bob Silverberg was sending me almost a story a month according to our agreement, and Earth was fair beneath our feet. Agberg, as he had taken to calling himself (Ag being the scientific abbreviation for “silver,” and if you don’t already know why that is, there’s no particular reason for me to burden you with it) seemed happy with our contract, as I knew I was, and it never seemed particularly spooky to me until I got another of those letters.

“Dear Fred,” it said, “have you noticed how your life and mine are playing a fugue across the calendar?”

They were, too. I bought a big house in Red Bank, New Jersey; Bob bought a bigger one in Riverdale, New York. My then wife, Carol, and I suffered one of the worst blows any couple has to live through when our first-born son died in infancy. Not long after Bob and Barbara Silverberg lost a newborn baby of their own.

Our home in Red Bank caught fire when a neglected electric blanket malfunctioned, and missed total destruction only because the local volunteer fire department happened to be holding its monthly membership meeting just then in their firehouse a couple of blocks away. And then the Silverberg house in Riverdale caught itself on fire and barely missed its own total destruction.

So Bob wrote me, “It’s obvious that every disaster in your lives is going to be copied by a facsimile in ours. So, Fred, here’s the thing. Will you be good enough to give us a little warning before the next catastrophe so we can get a head start in preparing for ours?”

 
As it happened, Carol and I weren’t intending — or experiencing — any significant life-style changes around then. Not true for Bob and Barbara, though. No sooner did they see the repair work completed on their house — and there was nothing “sooner” about it: you have no idea how drearily long it takes to put a partly burnt-out house back into the immaculate shape it had when you bought it; you couldn’t imagine how long unless you were unlucky enough to live through a rebuilding of your own. Anyway, no sooner did they get it done than they put the house on the market, found a buyer, and immediately changed their whole lifestyle. No more New York grandee. Now they were California sun worshippers, putting down new roots up in the hilly countryside across the Bay from San Francisco.

You understand that I’m not criticizing them, exactly. Indeed, I sometimes wonder why I didn’t pack up and move to California myself — or to Florida, or Hawaii, or maybe Tahiti. I mean, I’m a writer. I don’t have to go to an office. I can live anywhere, and I truly, bitterly, unforgivingly HATE cold weather. (Heat doesn’t bother me at all. I attribute this to having spent the first year of my life in the Panama Canal Zone, where heat is all you ever get, so you get used to it. But whatever the reason, come every Thanksgiving I begin berating myself for not moving to where you spend the holidays at 80 degrees instead of 8.)

I did, however, wonder what Bob and Bobby had traded in that fine Riverdale mansion in for. (Riverdale, remember. That’s actually a part of the Bronx, but you must never remind any Riverdalean that that is true. They may cry.)

I can’t say I really envied the Silverbobs their semi-palace. Any more rooms than the thirteen I already owned would have simply been showing off, and I had a full acre of land, with a pretty little river flowing along two sides of it, compared to their approximately two and a half square feet of grounds, bounded by city streets all over. But, ah, that library! Their house had been owned before them by a couple of New York celebrities, and although I’ve forgotten their names, they must have been great readers. The house’s library room was nearly the square footage of my living room and dining room combined, and it was two stories high! With bookshelves going floor to ceiling on every wall! And those roll-away stepladders everywhere, too, so if you wanted to read selections from half a dozen volumes you were probably going to be getting in your day’s exercise at the same time, too!

So you understand that I wanted to see what the Silverbobs had traded in that sort of high-tech bibliotechnology wonders for. That was easy enough to arrange. Next time I was on the West Coast on my publisher’s expense-account dollar I gave Bob a call. “Sure. Come on up and see us,” he said. “Don’t come in the main entrance, though. We’ll be in the pool. Go left about a hundred feet and there’s another entrance. We’ll let you in there.”

So I did as directed, and Bob did as promised, and there they were, Bobby and Bob and their very nice pool, about the same size as my own, but surrounded by much nicer plantings and in a much nicer climate and, when you came down to it, missing only one thing. Clothing, that was. The Silverbobs weren’t bothering with bathing suits that year. Didn’t need them, either. The two of them had those diet-watched, exercise-unskipped bodies that I — well, that I didn’t.

They invited me to join them for a dip, but I declined. It wasn’t modesty that made me say no. It was mostly that I just wanted to get back on the bars and the rowing machines for a while first.

 
A while later my wife Carol and I agreed to disagree and she left the big old house on Front Street for diggings of her own. When I mentioned this to Bob in a letter he replied, “Huh. You starting up that fugue thing again? Bobby moved into her own place a week ago.”

It’s all right, though. I promised Bob I wouldn’t do anything like dying, going bankrupt or contracting a loathsome disease with first warning him, And so far I haven’t.

 
Related posts:
Robert Silverberg