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Spaceways, v. 4, issue 5, whole no. 28, June 1942
Page 23
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SPACEWAYS 23 THE READERS ALWAYS WRITE expression of the idea than on the idea itself. " .....If I Werewolf IV degenerates to a new low; to think Art Widner did this to us! I have never seen more convincing proof of the fact that Art is extremely busy nowadays; this looks like something hastily scrawled on a sheet of wrapping paper during his lunch hour, and mailed to you without revision of any kind. It is a pitiful travesty on what Art could have done, had he considered the effort worth any time and trouble. 5. " Emergency flare fart outshone Beach Light; rating stands at 9; best in issue, easily. One statement you make I question; I am not aware that any fans with the single exception of the Swishers "knew all along" that Singleton's suicide was a fake. Explain, pretty please! (I should have been more clear; I meant those fans like you, Widner, Ackerman, Trudy Kuslan and me, who learned the truth long before all fandom as a whole did. HW) Robert W. Lowndes, 136 E. 28th St., New York, N. Y., retorts: Thanks for the offer to publish some sort of reply to the items in your column which apply to Columbia in general and Future and Science Fiction Quarterly in particular. .....I do know one thing we had been doing, which so far as I can see was a perfectly honest mistake. Our Western titles use a lot of books "first magazine publication". As a rule, we change the titles when we use them. Well, we'd been putting the title we used in the copyright notice--which was incorrect. Example: in a coming issue of Real Western will appear a novel by Galen C. Colin called "Lone Wolf Lawman". I changed that title to "The Lawman Rides Alone". But on the contents page, we shouldn't say "The Lawman Rides Alone", copyright 1942 by Phoenix Press, but "Lone Wolf Lawman", copyright 1942 by Phoenix Press. Just how long we'd been doing that in the past, I dunno. But I suspect that is what accounts for the "fake copyright" charge. And, at times, we'd put the book under the name of Cliff Campbell or other house-monickers. " But in regard to the "good fight". Haw! And then again haw! If you mean that any fight is a good fight, then you can call this present war by that name. But if you interpret it in the nature of a crusade upon the part of fine upstanding publishers for better conditions at all that--well, that's the way they planned it-- that you should. " I'll leave it to others to decide whether or not the fight against the use of reprints per se is essentially good. " But as for the "crusade"--it's a good publicity gag, that's about all. Outside of Popular, practically all the companies which issue pulps use reprints, and none of them advertise the fact upon the covers. Even FFM, which is entirely reprint. And as for the Writers Digest--could there be any connection between the fact that they have always whitewashed certain publishers who were big advertisers in the Digest and jumped up on other publishers who were not? (I refer to good-will ads, boosters, and that sort of thing.....) " What about our old friends, Starting and Captain Future? Both have used reprints from Volume One number one; both started in before the first issue of Science Fiction Quarterly. How often was it stated on their cover that this issue contained a reprint--or on the content page? "Good fight", eh? And how often did you see the Writers Digest jumping on them for it? " As you yourself stated, Future and SFQuarterly never concealed the fact that we were reprinting--though we did not use the word reprint on our covers. (So what; it wasn't required, and no one else was doing it either.) But we did state definitely inside, on the layout, that said story was a reprint, and I tried to word the cover blurb so that reprint would be implied even though not actually stated. " I damn well suspect that, before this is over, the people who started this business are going to find it backfiring in their faces. And in the long run, these clever people will be hurt more than the initial object of their phony "crusade". " In closing, I might add that the coming issue of Science Fiction Quarterly will contain another eprint, Cummings' "Brigands of the Moon". " And to wind up the business of SFCynic, I'll admit freely that I was the general co-ordinator of it. My reasons for insisting that I was not the Cynic, solus, was that there were a number of opinions expressed in the Beacon Light columns with which I differ radically--I
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SPACEWAYS 23 THE READERS ALWAYS WRITE expression of the idea than on the idea itself. " .....If I Werewolf IV degenerates to a new low; to think Art Widner did this to us! I have never seen more convincing proof of the fact that Art is extremely busy nowadays; this looks like something hastily scrawled on a sheet of wrapping paper during his lunch hour, and mailed to you without revision of any kind. It is a pitiful travesty on what Art could have done, had he considered the effort worth any time and trouble. 5. " Emergency flare fart outshone Beach Light; rating stands at 9; best in issue, easily. One statement you make I question; I am not aware that any fans with the single exception of the Swishers "knew all along" that Singleton's suicide was a fake. Explain, pretty please! (I should have been more clear; I meant those fans like you, Widner, Ackerman, Trudy Kuslan and me, who learned the truth long before all fandom as a whole did. HW) Robert W. Lowndes, 136 E. 28th St., New York, N. Y., retorts: Thanks for the offer to publish some sort of reply to the items in your column which apply to Columbia in general and Future and Science Fiction Quarterly in particular. .....I do know one thing we had been doing, which so far as I can see was a perfectly honest mistake. Our Western titles use a lot of books "first magazine publication". As a rule, we change the titles when we use them. Well, we'd been putting the title we used in the copyright notice--which was incorrect. Example: in a coming issue of Real Western will appear a novel by Galen C. Colin called "Lone Wolf Lawman". I changed that title to "The Lawman Rides Alone". But on the contents page, we shouldn't say "The Lawman Rides Alone", copyright 1942 by Phoenix Press, but "Lone Wolf Lawman", copyright 1942 by Phoenix Press. Just how long we'd been doing that in the past, I dunno. But I suspect that is what accounts for the "fake copyright" charge. And, at times, we'd put the book under the name of Cliff Campbell or other house-monickers. " But in regard to the "good fight". Haw! And then again haw! If you mean that any fight is a good fight, then you can call this present war by that name. But if you interpret it in the nature of a crusade upon the part of fine upstanding publishers for better conditions at all that--well, that's the way they planned it-- that you should. " I'll leave it to others to decide whether or not the fight against the use of reprints per se is essentially good. " But as for the "crusade"--it's a good publicity gag, that's about all. Outside of Popular, practically all the companies which issue pulps use reprints, and none of them advertise the fact upon the covers. Even FFM, which is entirely reprint. And as for the Writers Digest--could there be any connection between the fact that they have always whitewashed certain publishers who were big advertisers in the Digest and jumped up on other publishers who were not? (I refer to good-will ads, boosters, and that sort of thing.....) " What about our old friends, Starting and Captain Future? Both have used reprints from Volume One number one; both started in before the first issue of Science Fiction Quarterly. How often was it stated on their cover that this issue contained a reprint--or on the content page? "Good fight", eh? And how often did you see the Writers Digest jumping on them for it? " As you yourself stated, Future and SFQuarterly never concealed the fact that we were reprinting--though we did not use the word reprint on our covers. (So what; it wasn't required, and no one else was doing it either.) But we did state definitely inside, on the layout, that said story was a reprint, and I tried to word the cover blurb so that reprint would be implied even though not actually stated. " I damn well suspect that, before this is over, the people who started this business are going to find it backfiring in their faces. And in the long run, these clever people will be hurt more than the initial object of their phony "crusade". " In closing, I might add that the coming issue of Science Fiction Quarterly will contain another eprint, Cummings' "Brigands of the Moon". " And to wind up the business of SFCynic, I'll admit freely that I was the general co-ordinator of it. My reasons for insisting that I was not the Cynic, solus, was that there were a number of opinions expressed in the Beacon Light columns with which I differ radically--I
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