Under the Moons of Mars: A History and Anthology of "the Scientific Romance" in the Munsey Magazines, 1912-1920 (57 page)

MUNSEY'S MAGAZINE was the basis of the publisher's fortune. As a twenty-five-cent publication appealing to the gentry, it lost money. Noting the success of PEARSON'S MAGAZINE in England at the U.S. equivalent of ten cents in gaining mass circulation and letting the advertisers provide the margin of profit, Munsey made the same move with the issue of October, 1893, and thereby changed the entire direction of American magazine publishing.

Munsey was aiming at an emerging middle class, with a high percentage of high-school graduates. He gave them a magazine in every way equal if not superior to the twenty-five-cent publications in quality, illustration, and size, tapping an open market where no competition existed. Today the same thing is happening as the quantity of college graduates is forcing a readjustment of magazine standards to appeal to the new mass market.

Munsey had been watching the attempts of two other magazines to hit this popular market. MCCLURE'S, with a price of fifteen cents, started with the issue of June, 1893, and COSMOPOLITAN, which cut its price from twenty-five cents to 12Vi cents with the July, 1893, issue, were moving in this direction. In short order they had to come in line with Munsey, but he was on his way to seven hundred thousand circulation, millions in profits, and a signal career as a publishing tycoon.

JUST AS the drop in price of MCCLURE'S and COSMOPOLITAN indicated that Munsey would have no exclusivity in the low-priced field for the middle class, the appearance and closely parallel editorial content of THE POPULAR MAGAZINE meant that the days of THE ARGOSY without competition were over. In contemplating his own companion, THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE, Munsey was confronted with the problem of an editor. His two most seasoned men, Matthew White, Jr., and Richard Titherton, were guiding THE ARGOSY and MUNSEY'S MAGAZINE respectively, and it would be foolhardy to endanger those two huge successes by burdening their editors with still more work. The logical man was Robert Hobart Davis, fiction editor of MUNSEY'S MAGAZINE, who had come to work for him in 1904.

Considering the short time he had been with the company, Davis had dramatically improved the quality of fiction in MUNSEY'S MAGAZINE and seemed to have a rare instinct for talent. His outstanding achievement had been to get O. Henry to agree to give him first look at everything he wrote. THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE editorship was to prove the spearhead of a career that was to gain for him a reputation as one of the greatest American fiction editors of all time, respected and, because of his great heart and human warmth, loved throughout the magazine and newspaper industry.

Robert H. Davis was a Midwesterner, son of the Reverend George Ransome Davis and Silvia Nichols Davis, born March 23, 1869, in Brownsville, Nebraska. His father and mother had come west to do missionary work among the Indians, and they were a particularly devoted and loving couple. He and his brothers, Sam and Bill, grew up in rugged fashion on the plains.

Sam was the newspaperman in the family and published the DAILY APPEAL out of Carson City, Nevada. Bob, when fifteen, went to work for him delivering newspapers on the back of a partially broken mustang. He left Carson City for San Francisco at nineteen, a skilled compositor, and got a position on the CHRONICLE. He became a reporter when the notes on a baseball game that he was setting were blown from the window, and having seen the game, he wrote it from memory so vividly that he was promoted.

At one time or another he worked on every San Francisco paper, and became a life-long fight fan after covering the James Corbett-Joe Choynski fight classic held aboard a barge. He briefly published a magazine called CHICK, then set out for New York in 1896 for a brighter future.

Working in conjunction with an artist, he became a feature writer for New York newspapers, including THE NEW YORK WORLD, Hearst's THE NEW YORK JOURNAL, and Pulitzer's THE MORNING WORLD. His biggest scoop was his expose of the Beef Trust, shipping inedible meat to soldiers fighting in the Spanish-American War.

Frank A. Munsey was looking for an editor for his NEW YORK SUNDAY NEWS, and it was important that the prospect be feature-oriented. Charles M. Palmer, who knew Davis from San Francisco, suggested him as editor.

Bob Davis went in to see Munsey on a Saturday and requested double the salary he was getting on THE NEW YORK MORNING WORLD to shift over. When Munsey was reluctant, Davis gave him until Monday to think it over.

Leaving the office, he met a friend, Frank Seaman, coming from the Lotos Club, who invited him to a private dinner given by Daniel Sully, cotton broker and father-in-law of Douglas Fairbanks. When Davis arrived, he found Frank A. Munsey was also a guest and was seated at his left. Tim Woodruff, governor, a man he had known for several years, was at his right.

Homer Davenport made a speech on life in the West, and Bob Davis rose and gave an impromptu talk of his own of incidents on the disappearing frontier. On being seated, Tim Woodruff suggested to Munsey that he get to know Davis better.

The reply of Munsey has become part of his legend: "it may interest you to know, my dear governor, that Mr. Davis enters my employ at ten A.M. Monday."

In recounting the incident, Davis added: "And for twenty-two agreeable, prosperous, and satisfactory years, I remained in his employ. ... I had an understanding I was never to be bothered. ... I got along with him." Once when asked how he could stand working for a man like Munsey, Davis replied: "Where else can I get twenty thousand dollars a year?"

One of the friends Davis hated to leave behind when he left THE MORNING WORLD was John Barrymore, later to become a famous actor, but who was then political cartoonist for the paper and on at least one occasion included Davis in one of his sketches.

Describing Bob Davis as he appeared at the age of seventy, Fred S. Mathias found him short, hunched, and heavy, with keen, searching eyes and a lined face. He displayed initial belligerence upon introduction, then his face would soften into a kindly composure. He had a pleasant voice, but it carried command. His office was lined with photos of famous people he had taken himself, including D. H. Lawrence, Jo Davidson, Jean Sibelius, and Irvin S. Cobb. During his lifetime he was regarded as probably America's greatest amateur photographer. As an editorial director he was a benevolent dictator.

Shortly after Davis took over editorship of THE NEW YORK SUNDAY NEWS, Frank A. Munsey killed it, as he had papers before and would many papers afterward. He then shifted Davis to MUNSEY'S MAGAZINE as fiction editor. THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE was Davis' first chance to prove what he could do with a magazine whose destinies he controlled. To assist him, Davis employed Thomas Newell Metcalf, a reporter he had worked with on THE NEW YORK WORLD.

The cover of the initial issue, in addition to the title, carried only a red shield on a blue background bearing the words "Something New." Beneath it was the information "First Number," the price, "10 cents," and "192 pages." A replica of the cover and the contents appeared in the January, 1905, THE ARGOSY, promoting the new venture.

The first issue carried two stories that could be construed as science fiction. The lead serial (five were started simultaneously) by W. Bert Foster, veteran from the old juvenile THE ARGOSY,
When Time Slipped a Cog
(January-May, 1905), had a clever situation where a man abruptly discovers that in a moment of faintness, while seated in his office, a year has vanished from his life, a year in which he has grown wealthy, married, and made scores of business deals of which he knows nothing. His attempts to reconcile events made for a good story.

In the same issue there was another of those sociological fantasies for which the Munsey Magazines had such a predeliction, THE GREAT SLEEP TANKS, by Margaret Prescott Montague. The essence of sleep is extracted from the atmosphere by an inventor and sold in jars. He becomes powerful enough to challenge the government, and is deposed when the great sleep tanks are scuttled, sending the insomniac populace into one prolonged slumber.

A clever little story by Howard R. Garis, who would a few years later write the Tom Swift series and then received acclaim with the creation of Uncle Wiggily, told how a grounded electric cable turned a manhole cover into a magnet, which kept setting off a police box; the story was appropriately titled
The Ghost at Box 13
. Garis would go on to write a number of short, humorous science-fiction tales for THE ARGOSY.

The most significant change came with the February, 1905, THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE, which had a pictorial cover showing two cowboys whooping it up. Munsey had been a leader in many things, but this time he was going to follow. The artist Hamilton King, who had introduced
Ayesha
on the cover of the January, 1905, THE POPULAR MAGAZINE, painted the April, 1905, cover of THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE, showing two stylish women proceeding along a street on a windy day. The issues that followed introduced Valentine Sandberg, W. E. Wood, E. B. Mead, and Howard Giles with a series of pastel-shaded depictions in the most superb taste, of lovely girls in maidenly settings, sailing vessels at sea, exotic scenes from the Near East, a stagecoach in motion, and homespun scenes from life. The following March, 1906, F. X. Chamberlain, who had done the third (March, 1905) cover for
Ayesha
for THE POPULAR MAGAZINE, made the first of many appearances.

Of all the cover artists, Valentine Sandberg had the most pleasing technique, somewhat like an etching in pastel shades, at the same time capturing the spirit of the period completely. The Sandberg cover most pleasing to the science-fiction readers must have been that of April, 1906, showing a one-man dirigible with an airplane propeller to the fore, soaring over the Flatiron Building, in which the magazine's editorial offices were quartered. The covers of THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE depicted no scenes from stories during this period. Within a year the publication carried thirty-five pages of advertising an issue and claimed to be printing two hundred fifty thousand copies for distribution.

Color covers were not to be confined to THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE alone; the October, 1905, issue of THE ARGOSY sported the first pictorial cover since its conversion to a pulp. It portrayed an Indian, with gun in hand, gliding down a river in a canoe, with an orange moon suspended in the sky. The covers that followed attempted to symbolize Hie action to be found in THE ARGOSY, and in this respect they were far truer to the actual content of the publication than were the covers of THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE and THE POPULAR MAGAZINE. On the other hand, they were also far inferior in artistic execution and generally had only two colors instead of three or four.

The thirty-five pages or so of advertising carried by THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE were not all that they seemed. For years Frank A. Munsey had established himself at an advertising rate of one dollar per page per one thousand readers. He cut this rate in half in offering combination prices on advertising in both THE ARGOSY and THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE, nearly seven hundred thousand circulation for three hundred dollars, or less than fifty cents per page per one thousand readers. This meant that THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE, which did not sell over two hundred thousand copies per month, received a maximum of one hundred per page when the advertising revenue was prorated according to the circulation of each publication.

The special effectiveness of Bob Davis as a cultivator of literary talent displayed itself as early as the April, 1905, issue, in which a first story by a new writer, Mary Roberts Rinehart, was plotted around a love triangle titled
A Gasoline Road Agent
. Other short stories followed, and as the man who encouraged her the most, Davis was privileged to receive and publish the mystery novel that established her fame,
The Circular Staircase
(November, 1907-March, 1908). Bob Davis had a way with women. He encouraged and published the first stories of Fannie Hurst and Faith Baldwin. He bought the first story of E. J. Rath (Edith R. Branerd) and gave her the plot of her second story,
Nervous Wreck
, which appeared as a book, a play, and a moving picture starring Otto Kruger.

The interest THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE took in publishing science fiction was evidenced by their reprinting of
The Moon Metal
, by Garrett P. Serviss, complete in the May, 1905, issue. Originally published as a book by Harper's in 1900, it enjoyed a good sale and was syndicated in a number of newspapers. The story deals with the discovery of an unlimited supply of gold in the antarctic, which destroys its market value, and a scientist comes up with a new metal, artemesium, which replaces gold as the foundation for international currency. It is determined that the new metal is taken from the moon by a matter-transmission device, and other scientists eventually learn the method, so that artemesium, too, loses all value. Its emotional content is handled so well that this short novel has remained fresh and effective across a span of many years and has become a fixed classic in the field of science fiction.

Still another competitor entered the all-fiction pulp field in the form of THE MONTHLY STORY MAGAZINE, dated May, 1905. This magazine would become, with the May, 1907, issue, THE BLUE BOOK MAGAZINE and its policy was similar to that of THE ARGOSY, THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE, and THE POPULAR MAGAZINE. If anything, it was a bit closer to the two Munsey pulps in its regular use of science fiction than was THE POPULAR MAGAZINE. It introduced to the field of science fiction George Allan England, destined to become a major figure. That inaugural story was
The Time Deflector
, in the September, 1905, issue, telling of a man who discovers a method of reading the past through a telescope from the light that left the earth previously and has been reflected from other worlds in space. The idea had been used a year earlier in the book
Around a Distant Star
, by Jean Delaire, in England, but it may have been its earliest appearance in the United States.

The following year Street & Smith decided to issue a companion to THE POPULAR MAGAZINE, titled PEOPLE'S MAGAZINE, with the issue of July, 1906. It was a direct competitive adventure entry, with 192 pages for ten cents and a misleading family-style cover. Its policy was much like that of THE POPULAR MAGAZINE, though its use of science fiction was, if anything, even less frequent, though it did not categorically bar it. The November, 1906, issue carried
The Poison That Leaves No Trace
, by Howard Fielding, aptly termed "a fantastic tale of chemistry." It had a few brief articles and an editor's and reader's department, "Let's Talk It Over." In 1908 it jumped the price to fifteen cents and ran a four-color frontispiece suitable for framing and thirty-two pages of actual scenes from current stage plays, plus 192 pages of fiction. It ran no serials. The frontispiece and stage photos were dropped, and it went to 224 pages of fiction with illustrations. It carried the Jimmy Dale stories of Frank L. Packard from 1912 on, and was a pulp of formidable quality.