THE COMPLETE FAMOUS FANTASTIC MYSTERIES and FANTASTIC NOVELS on 4 DVDs

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THE COMPLETE FAMOUS FANTASTIC MYSTERIES, FANTASTIC NOVELS & A. MERRITT'S FANTASY MAGAZINEOffered today is the complete, combined 107 issue run of Famous Fantastic Mysteries and it's companion magazine Fantastic Novels. Also included in this set is the complete five issue run of A. Merritt's Fantasy Magazine, a companion to FFM and FN. Each issue has been digitally scanned, cover-to-cover, and includes all the original advertisements, letters to the editor, illustrations and of course, all the great stories. Viewing software is included for viewing these scans on a Mac or PC computer.This collection is very close to my heart. Famous Fantastic Mysteries was the pulp magazine that convinced me to start collecting pulps many years ago. It's pages introduced me to an entire genre of fantasy adventure stories and authors that I continue to love to this day.Famous Fantastic Mysteries was originally published by the Munsey Company. It's owner, Frank Munsey, had been publishing magazines since the 1880s. Munsey changed publishing history when he correctly surmised that a magazine didn't have to be printed on slick, expensive paper to be successful, as was common when he started. He knew that if the stories in his magazines were good, he could cut costs by using cheap, wood pulp paper and readers would buy them anyway. This is the origin of the term "pulp fiction". Munsey published many successful magazines including Argosy, All-Story and Cavalier. During the late 1800s and early 1900s, many great early classics of fantasy and science fiction were printed in their pages. By the late 1930s there was a growing demand for Munsey to reprint these great classics from years before. The solution to meet this demand was the creation of Famous Fantastic Mysteries and it's companion, Fantastic Novels.Starting in 1939 and running through 1953, Famous Fantastic Mysteries published 81 issues, all contained in this collection. The magazine was an immediate success. Early issues typically contained a half dozen or so short stories and a chunk of a larger, novel length story told in serial form. Printing novels in serial form was very common in other magazines of the day. But readers of Famous Fantastic Mysteries complained that they didn't want to wait up to a year to get all the chapters of a story. So, very quickly it was decided to publish a companion magazine called Fantastic Novels, each issue of which would contain a complete novel. Fantastic Novels published 25 issues between 1940 and 1951 and all are contained here.Much of the success of both FFM and FN was due to the choices and editing of the brilliant editor Mary Gnaedinger. She edited both magazines for their complete runs. Little is known biographically about Gnaedinger other than that she was born in 1897 and that her maiden name was Jacobson. She died in 1976. What made Gnaedinger great was her ability to tighten up and increase the pace and readability of the old stories being reprinted. She could take the stuffy old writing from a book written decades earlier and make it seem contemporary without actually rewriting the story. She was truly an editing genius!The letters column in both magazines became almost as popular as the magazines themselves. Gnaedinger would often directly respond to readers' comments. Most readers would make requests in their letters for stories and novels they would like to see reprinted. Over the course of publication, virtually all of the readers' requests were fulfilled. Readers' letters were a great learning tool for readers like myself in learning the names of great fantasy authors and the stories they wrote.Many great stories and novels appeared in the pages of FFM and FN. Of note were the works of A. Merritt, George Allan England, Austin Hall, H. Rider Haggard, Francis Stevens, Victor Rousseau, Ray Cummings, Ralph Milne Farley, C. L. Moore, John Taine, George Chalis and many others. The talented artists Virgil Finlay and Lawrence Stevens illustrated most issues and much of their best work was printed here. We've inclu... read more

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