Argosy, Vol. 122, No. 1 — page 152: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

ETWEEN eighty and a hundred manuscripts reach this office every day, nearly all of them from unsolicited sources, and most of them stories. These are all carefully examined by the various editors, and a scrupulous record is kept of their receipt and return. For most of them are returned. This house issues two weeklies and one monthly magazine, and supposing we were to accept, say, fifty contributions: a day, which would mean three hundred a week instead of the thirty- five to forty, which is our average, you can readily see how speedily we should bankrupt ourselves by piling up matter we could not utilize for generations to come. But there is never any fear that we shall be tempted to do this. Most of the offerings are so crude, so absolutely worthless, that there is nothing to stand in the way of the really meritorious manuscripts finding a market. In other words, I mean to say that the forty odd stories for which checks go to their various..authors each week—this is an outside figure, remember, for sometimes we find but ten to fifteen worthy of purchase—represent the only worth-while material discoverable in the vast mass of slush which daily comes to this office. a 3 se Beyond this borderland of sight and sense, this familiar world of ours, there is— what? We walk in the sunlight, and it warms us, nor does it give us even a hint of the infinite bleakness of interstellar space—yet as to the limits of that borderland, who can say? And what possible explanation could there be for a “ dead spirit ”? “ SERAPION ” BY FRANCIS STEVENS Author of “ Citadel of Fear,” “ Claimed,” “ Avalon,” ete. is a story unfinished; because not even the master of the weird who wrote it can foretell the end, which no man knoweth. For sheer power, for gripping dread, for ‘supreme story-telling magic, it is a masterpiece greater even than “ Citadel of Fear,” that serial unusual. And I would not advise you to read it at two in the morning, when; they say, the barrier is weakest between life as we know it and that death-in-life which is an eternal prison-house for rebel souls. This begins as a four-part serial in THe Arcosy for Ju ; HE or June 19 r r re If you want to be shown—if you demand the eating of the pudding for proof of its excellence—if you want to begin a story that you will be sorry to finish—then “SHOW ME!” BY CHARLES WESLEY SANDERS Author of “A Habit of Noticing Things,” ete. is what you have been looking for.- For from the entry of the Man from Missouri up to the exit of Scranton, the Benevolent, the story moves to its inevitable and 142 cComiclbooks.com