Imagination (magazine)

Imagination was an American fantasy and science fiction magazine first published in October 1950 by Raymond Palmer’s Clark Publishing Company. The magazine was sold almost immediately to Greenleaf Publishing Company, owned by William Hamling, who published and edited it from the third issue, February 1951, for the rest of the magazine’s life. Despite this success, the magazine had a reputation for low-quality space opera and adventure fiction, and modern literary historians refer to it in dismissive terms.

About Imagination (magazine) in brief

Imagination was an American fantasy and science fiction magazine first published in October 1950 by Raymond Palmer’s Clark Publishing Company. The magazine was sold almost immediately to Greenleaf Publishing Company, owned by William Hamling, who published and edited it from the third issue, February 1951, for the rest of the magazine’s life. Hamling launched a sister magazine, Imaginative Tales, in 1954; both ceased publication at the end of 1958 in the aftermath of major changes in US magazine distribution due to the liquidation of American News Company. Despite this success, the magazine had a reputation for low-quality space opera and adventure fiction, and modern literary historians refer to it in dismissive terms. Few of the stories from Imagination have received recognition, but it did publish Robert Sheckley’s first professional sale, “Final Examination”, in the May 1952 issue, and also printed fiction by Philip K. Dick, Robert A. Heinlein and John Wyndham. American science fiction magazines first appeared in the 1920s with the appearance of Amazing Stories, a pulp magazine published by Hugo Gernsback. The first issue of Imagination, dated October 1950 on a planned bi-monthly schedule, appeared on news stands 1 August 1950. From a low of eight active magazines in 1946, the field expanded to 20 in 1950, and a further 22 had commenced publication by 1954.

In 1957, many magazines had to scramble to find new distributors, and that they were in a larger format than the digest-size common in the US. The larger format required higher revenue to be profitable, but in many cases it proved impossible to attract the additional advertising that would have kept the magazines afloat as would have been needed to keep them afloat. In the end, many titles had to disappear as a result of a major distributor liquidation, and many of them had to be sold off. The last issue was dated October 1958, and it was the last issue to be published in the United States before the publication of the first edition of The New York Review of Books. The final issue of the last edition was dated March 1959, and the final issue was published on October 30, 1959. It was the first issue to have a masthead listing the editor as ‘Robert N. Webster’, a pseudonym Palmer adopted while he was still at Ziff-Davis because of the conflict of interest. The second issue of Other Worlds reported that Webster and Palmer were going to edit together; by the thirdissue, dated March 1950, the pretense had been dropped and although there was no masthead listed the editor, the editorial was simply signed ‘Rap’

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