Many readers may not know the extent of Hugo Gernsback’s publishing empire. Some believe that it’s extent and (seeming) success was one of the factors that led to the enforced bankruptcy that cost him Amazing Stories (and engendered Science Wonder Stories). To give you some idea, at one time following the bankruptcy, Gernsback Publications Company and the Stellar Publishing Company offered the following titles:
- Science Wonder Stories
- Air Wonder Stories
- Wonder Stories
- Science Wonder Quarterly / Wonder Stories Quarterly
- Science-Fiction Plus
- Radio-Craft
- Short Wave Craft
- Television News
- Short Wave & Television / Radio and Television
- Everyday Mechanics / Everyday Science and Mechanics
- Scientific Detective Monthly / Amazing Detective Tales
- Aviation Mechanics
- Popular Microscopy
- Fotocraft
- Sexology
- French Humor / Tidbits
- Facts of Life / Know Yourself
Quite a list!
Among those titles was a magazine described as “Sexology magazine was a substantial and understudied influence on mid-century sexual discourse in the United States.”
Which is the subject of a recently published paper by Professor Matthew Lavine of Mississippi State University, titled The Real Appeal of Sexology Magazine’s Fictive Sexual Spaces in Postwar America which you can read right here.
I thought that given the general interest here in Gernsback’s activities, our readers might want to take a look.
To um, whet your appetite, here’s a small gallery of some of the magazine’s covers:
Steve Davidson is the publisher of Amazing Stories.
Steve has been a passionate fan of science fiction since the mid-60s, before he even knew what it was called.
