Under the Moons of Mars: A History and Anthology of "the Scientific Romance" in the Munsey Magazines, 1912-1920 (54 page)

This attitude was reflected in his letter of April 3, 1912, after not receiving anything from Burroughs for a month; he suggested that possibly he had interfered too much—after all, if he hadn't suggested a historical story, Burroughs would not have written
The Outlaw of Torn
—and wondered if there was anything new under way.

When Burroughs replied, briefly outlining
Tarzan of the Apes
in his letter of April 5, Metcalf responded anxiously, requesting to see it. When he received no further communication for almost seven weeks, Metcalf queried again on May 25.

He was relieved to learn that Burroughs had been involved managing the System Service Bureau, for the System Company, a firm devoted to specialty advertising and business methods, but hoped to complete
Tarzan of the Apes
in about a week.

The novel was mailed to Metcalf on June 11, 1912, and totaled eighty-three thousand words. Burroughs carefully specified that first serial rights only were being offered for sale; all other rights were withheld. He later received a letter from Robert H. Davis, dated January 27, 1913, confirming this fact for the American Press Association, which, on February 10, 1913, syndicated the Tarzan novel in a number of newspapers. The letter on rights was the first he ever received from Davis, who was the real power behind THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE and the major fiction editor of all Munsey titles, including THE ARGOSY, MUNSEY'S MAGAZINE, CAVALIER, and RAILROAD MAN'S MAGAZINE.

He was mailed a check for seven hundred dollars for
Tarzan of the Apes
on June 26, which he received June 28 at 2008 Park Avenue, Chicago. On the date of receipt he wrote to Metcalf suggesting that his real name by-line the novel, with Norman Bean in brackets beneath it. THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE for October, 1912, in which
Tarzan of the Apes
appeared, has become one of the landmark issues in the history of pulp magazines and one of the most sought after. Verified prices of one hundred dollars have been paid for the issue in complete sound condition, and the price is destined to go higher in the future, particularly since Die novel has already become a permanent classic to place alongside

Treasure Island
, by Robert Louis Stevenson,
Tom Sawyer
, by Mark Twain, and
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
, by Jules Verne.

The full-color cover by Clinton Pettee depicts Tarzan with his right arm encircling the throat of a great lion and his left hand uplifted with a dagger, ready to plunge it into the beast's side. A quiver of arrows is strung around his neck, and in the background a white man with a spear in his hand watches the dramatic contest in open-mouthed amazement. The cover carried the title
Tarzan of the Apes
and beneath it the subtitle "A Romance of the Jungle." The novel was printed complete in a single issue, occupying 132 of the 240 pages the readers received in those days for 15 cents, and this did not include another twenty pages of advertisements on coated stock. There was a single interior illustration, a silhouette of Tarzan swinging from a tree, which was unsigned.

"We believe that it goes without saying," the editors wrote in "All-Story Table-Talk," "that 'Tarzan of the Apes' is about as original a yarn as we've seen in a long while, and we shall be very much disappointed if we don't hear the same from some of our friendly readers."

There cannot be too many adults unfamiliar with the plot of
Tarzan of the Apes
, but for those few exceptions it is a recommended reading experience. A man and wife are stranded on a wild portion of the African coast by a mutinous crew. They build shelter and manage to survive. The woman saves her husband from death at the hands of a great ape, but the experience unsets her mind. That night a baby boy is born to her. She dies one year later, and in his grief her husband does not hear three great apes enter the cabin. He is killed, but his son is snatched up by a she ape who has recently lost her young one. She suckles the child, and it grows to manhood among the apes, becoming super-normally strong with an animal's acute sensory development. As time goes by the young Tarzan finds the cabin and teaches himself to read and write from the primers therein.

Gradually he rises to supremacy over the ape tribe, and the African natives come to fear his strength and ingenuity.

Another group of whites is put ashore by a mutinous crew, this time including a girl named Jane Porter. Among them is Cecil Clayton, an heir to the Greystoke fortune and a relative of Tarzan's. The group is saved by Tarzan from a series of near disasters, including Jane's capture by a Great Ape and rescue by Tarzan, which builds the foundation for love between them.

Back in England, Jane decides to marry Cecil Clayton, feeling that her attraction to Tarzan is an irrational primeval desire. She tells Tarzan, who also loves her, why she has made her decision. Within moments a telegram is received by Tarzan confirming that he is the son of Lord Greystoke and entitled to the estate. This will leave Cecil Clayton and his wife-to-be, Jane Porter, without any substantive means. Tarzan keeps the news to himself, and when Clayton asks him how he ever got into the jungle, the story ends with a renunciation of both love and fortune:

"I was born there," replies Tarzan, quietly. "My mother was an ape, and of course she couldn't tell me much about it. I never knew who my father was."

From the instant the story was distributed, the letters came like a torrent. The readers were both delighted and furious. Thrilled by the freshness of the plot and caliber of storytelling, they were outraged that the magnificent, noble Tarzan had come out on the short end of the situation. They pleaded, demanded, and threatened dire consequences if a sequel was not written to rectify the unsatisfactory situation.

Within days after the issue reached the newsstand, both Metcalf and his boss, Robert H. Davis, realized they had an incredible success on their hands. Davis had discovered dozens of famed authors before and would develop and discover scores more, but none had aroused reader interest of such enthusiastic proportions as Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Before the issue was off the stands, Metcalf wrote Burroughs on September 18 begging for a sequel. A reply from Burroughs September 20 expressed doubts as to his ability to write a good follow up, but told Metcalf that a sequel to
Under the Moons of Mars
, plotted to develop the implications of the valley of Dor, the sea of Korus, and the river Iss, was almost finished.

The manuscript,
The Gods of Mars
, was mailed from Chicago October 2 and accepted October 11. On October 12 Metcalf mailed Burroughs scores of laudatory letters. On October 16 a check for seven hundred and fifty dollars was sent for the eighty-five thousand-word manuscript, with the understanding that it, too, would be published under Burroughs' name. This was followed on October 21 by still more laudatory letters.

Edgar Rice Burroughs expressed dissatisfaction with the size of the check on October 30, stating that he felt he deserved more. He asked that more letters commenting upon his work be forwarded. On November 19 Metcalf agreed to up the word rate on the next manuscript and to keep the letters flowing.

There was another compelling reason why THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE desperately needed Edgar Rice Burroughs at this particular moment in its history. All over America the price of periodicals was mounting. Frank A. Munsey, pioneer of the ten-cent popular magazine supported by advertising, and then pioneer again of the ten-cent all-fiction pulp, which was self-sustaining because of its low production costs, had used this as his major selling stance.

Now the situation reached the point where Munsey could no longer hold the line. THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE, with 192 pages of fiction for ten cents, was a tremendous bargain, but aside from a regular presentation of science fiction and fantasy, it was not demonstrably superior to its many competitors. Once the price went to fifteen cents, an increase of fifty percent, its survival would be dependent upon the quality of its content and the appeal of its story policy. A companion magazine, THE CAVALIER, in policy and appearance virtually identical with THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE, hadn't been making it even at 192 pages for ten cents, and a radical experiment in weekly publication for it was being tried. There was no reason to believe that THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE without its advantage of low price could effectively buck the competition.

Except for the advent of Edgar Rice Burroughs.

The first fifteen-cent issue of THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE was July, 1912. In the preceding number, the publisher, Frank A. Munsey, on a blue four-page insert, had broken the news to the readers, offering as justification a quadrupling in authors' rates in the preceding twenty years, a great advance in paper and printing costs, the reluctance of the news dealers to promote the low-priced magazines, and reminding one and all that he and his magazines had been the avant-garde of popular-priced publications. He promised a much larger magazine, an increase from 192 to 240 pages, a more readable type face, and a book-length novel complete in each issue.

For the first fifteen-cent issue the novel would be
The Red Book of Mystery
, a superior murder mystery involving a young doctor in a Scottish village, by Robert Simpson. Between 1917 and 1920 Robert Simpson would select manuscripts for THE ARGOSY, in 1919 he would have the modest distinction of being chosen as one of America's top ninety novelists by critic Charles C. Baldwin, and he would become the editor of the praiseworthy MYSTERY MAGAZINE in 1926. Even if all this accomplishment had been telescoped in time to the year 1912, it could not have made him the salvation THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE needed to carry it successfully through its price change.

The biggest thing in their favor was that
Under the Moons of Mars
concluded with the July issue and carried over enough enthralled readers to give the revamped magazine a fair sampling.

The almost frantic buildup for the Tarzan novel in September, throwing it lock, stock, and barrel into the October number, underscored the urgency of their situation. They were buying time, issue by issue, month by month, until they could stabilize their readership. The entire structure of the magazine world was changing, that of the popular family magazines as well as of Hie pulps, and (heir place in (he new order was still clouded.

^*
J. Norman Lynd contributed a cartoon to a 1916 issue of the weekly
Life
, depicting Frank A. Munsey, owner of THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE, as a gravedigger, burying the many newspapers he bought and then discarded. When Munsey bought The NEW YORK HERALD in 1920, one of his first acts was to fire Lynd, who was working for that paper as a cartoonist, he may never have been aware that Lynd had been a widely used illustrator of his own magazines.

THE ARGOSY, Frank A. Munsey's initial magazine, had been an immensely successful all-fiction pulp, the
first
all-fiction pulp, and had prospered for nine years prior to the launching of THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE. THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE was not a calculated venture but a hasty reaction to competition. THE ARGOSY magazine had gone through many changes, but with the October, 1896, number Frank A. Munsey converted it from a second-rate general magazine of articles, fiction, and photos (the dimensions of NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC) to an all-fiction magazine printed on a good grade of uncoated stock, dropping that for pulp paper in December. There were 192 pages for ten cents, printed straight across the page like a book, with the names of the authors at the end of the stories in italics. Frank A. Munsey asserted that the circulation doubled when he made the policy change, from forty thousand to eighty thousand in a single issue, then inexplicably leveled out for four years, after which sales soared upward. He gave net-profit figures year by year to verify this fact. By 1904 the magazine had passed the four-hundred-thousand mark and would reach a half-million in the year ahead. Profits for the year ended December, 1904, would be two hundred thirty-seven thousand dollars and would reach three hundred thousand by 1907.

Circulation may have been helped by combining two publications with THE ARGOSY during that period. PETERSON'S MAGAZINE was absorbed with the September, 1899, issue. The magazine had been running steadily since its January, 1842, issue, and was noted for a high literary tone in its nonfiction, which made it a strange bedfellow for THE ARGOSY. The other publication was JUNIOR MUNSEY, begun as QUAKER in 1897 and combined with THE ARGOSY with the April, 1902, number.

What part, if any, did science fiction play in the early success of THE ARGOSY? It is difficult to weigh this factor, through obviously it did not retard it, since with the inexplicable exception of the year 1900, science fiction made up a conspicuous portion of the editorial content.

Though the first science fiction carried by the one-hundred-percent pulp-paper magazine was a socially advanced
new
short story,
Citizen 504
, by Charles H. Palmer (December, 1896), cautioning against the dangers of a highly regimented society, a substantial percentage of
all
the stories during the first few years were reprints. Many were from THE DAILY CONTINENT, the short-lived newspaper published by Munsey from February 1 to June 7, 1891; others were from MUNSEY'S MAGAZINE and a good number from GOLDEN ARGOSY and THE ARGOSY. Among the reprints were science-fiction novels of some merit.
A Month in the Moon
, by Andre Laurie (Paschall Grousselt), a well-told story of gigantic magnets which pull the moon down to the surface of the Sahara Desert, appeared in eight monthly installments, February-September, 1897. Its original appearance in America was as
The Conquest of the Moon
in seventeen weekly installments in THE ARGOSY, November 16, 1889-March 8, 1890. Previous to that, it had been an outstanding seller in hardcovers in France and England. It was serialized in England's THE BOY'S OWN PAPER in thirty-six installments, January 19-September 21, 1889, as
A Marvelous Conquest: A Story of the Bayouda
.