The Way the Future Blogs

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. . . .

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

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.

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

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.
 
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• 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.

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

I took the writers who had been getting $75 checks from Thrilling Wonder and worked with them to begin selling to Galaxy at twice the rate.

Let’s talk for a bit about my career as an agent.

Mark Rich has a lot to say about my failings, especially my financial woes, which were considerable. A J Budrys told a funny story about them in one of the last speeches he gave, at the Heinlein Centennial, a year or two before he died. He had discovered what a great agent I was, he said, when I sold John Campbell a story of A J’s that Campbell had turned down cold before A J became my client. And then when he got my check, it bounced.

Funny story? Sadly, also a true one.

But the interesting thing there is that A J didn’t quit the agency. He remained my client until the waters finally closed over my head. And almost all of my other clients, Isaac Asimov and Hal Clement and John Wyndham and Fritz Leiber and all the other household names and the lesser names that I was bringing along gave me an amazing amount of patience, and most of them didn’t want to give up until I did.

And, most interesting of all, most of them were my good friends for the rest of my life.

Do you wonder why?

I’ll tell you why. It was because I was a hell of a good agent.

First, I took the writers who had been getting $75 checks from Thrilling Wonder and worked with them to begin selling to Galaxy at twice the rate, and then I worked with the — magazine writers to turn them into book authors, and I kept looking for new and better markets they could sell to. A few I managed to get into television deals, even into syndicated newspaper cartoon strips. Some I managed to promote from the pulps to the slicks, at many times the rate.

In short, I did everything a good agent did for his clients. (I would like to say that, even today, not all agents are quite that good.) But I did something rather more than that.

I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what made a good writer — almost any of my dozens of good writers — sometimes be productive and profitable and sometimes be unable to get anything written for days or weeks at a time. I tried several different ways of, first, encouraging the writers to write, and, second, to do so at the top of their form. I finally invented one that worked.

I made a promise to eight or ten of my best (but not always solvent) writers that any time they brought in a new story I would hand them a check for that much wordage.. My rate was low for these incentive checks, at a half cent a word, but then when the story actually sold to a publisher the writer would be credited at the publisher’s scale, not that of my advances.

As a result, if you look at the stories published in the last year or so of my agency’s existence you will find that there were a larger number than usual of really good stories by Budrys, James Blish, Damon Knight and a dozen or so other clients who took me up on that offer. It worked. It got the writers writing more, and sometimes better. It even increased my sales to those markets, a little. And if I were unfortunate enough to become an agent again, I would at once start up something like that for at least a few clients.

But it also represented one more outflow of capital, and there wasn’t enough capital left to flow. Most of my clients didn’t want to leave, but finally, I gave up and folded the agency, and started paying everybody back.

Interestingly, maybe I should say ironically, then two unexpected new lifesavers were thrown to me.

Continue reading ‘What My Clients Thought’ »