Page:Weird Tales Volume 12 Issue 05 (1928-11).djvu/138
The Eyrie
(Continued from page 580)
ing A. Merritt's fine story, The Woman of the Wood. It is your pseudo-scientific tales that I like most. Edmond Hamilton easily leads here, with Ray Cummings a close second. I agree with most of your readers in that those stories dealing with unearthly forces (as we know them, of course) are best. Yet Seabury Quinn is one of my favorites. Lovecraft is great, and Long's tale, The Space-Eaters, places him, too, high in my list of favorites. I make a plea for a quarterly of reprints from your regular issues, or at least some move in that direction. My mouth has watered at the titles of some of your stories from old issues before I was a reader of your magazine—tales which were so good that they are still recalled and praised by some of your readers who write in to The Eyrie. What thoughts a title like The Wind That Tramps the World brings up, or The People of the Comet! A title like that first must spontaneously be real, enduring literature—and it is buried in the past! I shall never be satisfied until some author of Weird Tales discovers a way to carry complete files of my favorite magazine into the hereafter. I would gladly sizzle on a gridiron to read Hamilton or Merritt."
As to reprinting favorite stories from old issues: We have never reprinted any of our own stories, for we have felt that it would be unfair to print in Weird Tales any story that thousands of our readers must have read in this magazine in a former issue. But lately we have received many requests that we reprint some of the cream of our previous stories—and these requests come from readers who have already read the stories they ask us to reprint. Three stories are particularly requested, from issues of 1924 and 1925: The Wind That Tramps the World, by Frank Owen; The Stranger From Kurdistan, by E. Hoffmann Price; and The Phantom Farmhouse, by Seabury Quinn. How about it, readers—do you want us to use, as our monthly reprint story, an occasional fine tale taken from old issues of this magazine, or shall we continue our present policy of choosing our monthly "Weird Story Reprint" entirely from among famous weird stories that have never before appeared in Weird Tales? Unless we receive an overwhelming number of requests for the reprint of old favorites from Weird Tales, we shall not reprint any of them until at least ten years after their first publication in this magazine—and Weird Tales is not yet six years old. But the decision is up to you. If you really want them, and want them enough to let us know your wishes in no uncertain terms, then we will give you, every few months, one of your old favorites from this magazine as our monthly "Weird Story Reprint"; but we shall not change our policy in this regard unless you really want us to do so. Weird Tales is your magazine, and we shall be guided entirely by what you, the readers, wish us to do.
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