presence of a fire warden.) To get from the reception room to any editor's office involved going up and down staircases, squeezing past rolls of paper stored to feed the ground-floor presses, reveling in the fascinating smells of printer's ink and rotting wood.
I didn't get past the reception room the first couple of times. I was met at the desk by a diffident young male assistant to Tremaine; he took the manuscript from my grubby young hands, flipped through it, and announced that I didn't have my name and address typed in the upper right-hand corner of the first page. It was on the last page, I told him. Well enough, he said, but it's supposed to be on the first one. He also pointed out that standard typing paper was 8½ x 11 inches and plain white, while what I was using was several inches longer than that and had narrow blue lines down the left-hand margin. Sorry about that, I said. (I didn't tell him the reason. My mother worked in a law office at that time, and legal cap was what she filched to bring home to me.) But he allowed me to leave the story with him, and a week or two later I got a penny postcard from Street & Smith, announcing that it was "ready for pickup." The card was a printed form, from which I deduced that I was not the only writer who had more time than postage stamps.
I came to see a great many of those cards over the years. Tremaine never bought a word from me, or even came very close. But he was nice about it. After the first couple of submissions he began inviting me down to his office to chat, and toward the end of his tenure even took me out to lunch now and then.
I cannot tell you how much this inflated me, not only in my own ego but in the estimation of my fellow fans. Heaven knows what he got out of it. Since I was editing several fanzines at the time, it is possible that he mistook me for some kind of power figure among the readers, but I don't really think so. I think Tremaine was just a good guy.
He was also a good editor. John Campbell is the worshipped god in the pantheon of Astounding , but Tremaine did some smart things. It was not his fault that he knew nothing at all about science fiction when he took it on; Street & Smith bought it and handed it to him as a chore, and that was that. He did his best to learn, and he succeeded. He published some incredible rot. He even wrote some of the sappiest of it, or at least so gossip says: "Warner Van Lorne," one of the most frequent bylines in his magazine, was supposed to be Tremaine himself. But he did some very smart things. (Including hiring John Campbell to succeed him when he was moved upstairs.) I liked him, respected him, missed him when he left, and wondered if this young punk Campbell would ever measure up to Tremaine's standards.
Tremaine was no scientist, and so Astounding during his tenure was likely to come up with some galumphing horrors, but the virtue of that defect was that he was able to publish some pretty fascinating stuff that any scientifically trained person would never touch. Not just stories. Astounding ran nearly the complete works of Charles Fort, in interminable serial form, compendia of curious and inexplicable happenings: minnows falling from a clear sky, strange lights of airships seen before airships were invented. The towering flights of fantasy in the Tremaine Astounding were an attractive change from the nuts-and-bolts gadgetry of Gernsback's Wonder or the stilted stodge of T. O'Conor Sloane's Amazing .
Nevertheless, as Astounding didn't seem to want to buy what I had to sell, I took my wares to the others, too. Wonder Stories was a grubby kind of magazine, full of self-glorifying little digs at the competition, such as long lists of titles of stories published in other magazines under the heading "Stories We Reject Appear Elsewhere." (Don Wollheim said it should have read "Stories We Don't Pay For Appear Elsewhere.") Yet it had two things going for it. One was that the major find of the mid-30s, a new
I didn't get past the reception room the first couple of times. I was met at the desk by a diffident young male assistant to Tremaine; he took the manuscript from my grubby young hands, flipped through it, and announced that I didn't have my name and address typed in the upper right-hand corner of the first page. It was on the last page, I told him. Well enough, he said, but it's supposed to be on the first one. He also pointed out that standard typing paper was 8½ x 11 inches and plain white, while what I was using was several inches longer than that and had narrow blue lines down the left-hand margin. Sorry about that, I said. (I didn't tell him the reason. My mother worked in a law office at that time, and legal cap was what she filched to bring home to me.) But he allowed me to leave the story with him, and a week or two later I got a penny postcard from Street & Smith, announcing that it was "ready for pickup." The card was a printed form, from which I deduced that I was not the only writer who had more time than postage stamps.
I came to see a great many of those cards over the years. Tremaine never bought a word from me, or even came very close. But he was nice about it. After the first couple of submissions he began inviting me down to his office to chat, and toward the end of his tenure even took me out to lunch now and then.
I cannot tell you how much this inflated me, not only in my own ego but in the estimation of my fellow fans. Heaven knows what he got out of it. Since I was editing several fanzines at the time, it is possible that he mistook me for some kind of power figure among the readers, but I don't really think so. I think Tremaine was just a good guy.
He was also a good editor. John Campbell is the worshipped god in the pantheon of Astounding , but Tremaine did some smart things. It was not his fault that he knew nothing at all about science fiction when he took it on; Street & Smith bought it and handed it to him as a chore, and that was that. He did his best to learn, and he succeeded. He published some incredible rot. He even wrote some of the sappiest of it, or at least so gossip says: "Warner Van Lorne," one of the most frequent bylines in his magazine, was supposed to be Tremaine himself. But he did some very smart things. (Including hiring John Campbell to succeed him when he was moved upstairs.) I liked him, respected him, missed him when he left, and wondered if this young punk Campbell would ever measure up to Tremaine's standards.
Tremaine was no scientist, and so Astounding during his tenure was likely to come up with some galumphing horrors, but the virtue of that defect was that he was able to publish some pretty fascinating stuff that any scientifically trained person would never touch. Not just stories. Astounding ran nearly the complete works of Charles Fort, in interminable serial form, compendia of curious and inexplicable happenings: minnows falling from a clear sky, strange lights of airships seen before airships were invented. The towering flights of fantasy in the Tremaine Astounding were an attractive change from the nuts-and-bolts gadgetry of Gernsback's Wonder or the stilted stodge of T. O'Conor Sloane's Amazing .
Nevertheless, as Astounding didn't seem to want to buy what I had to sell, I took my wares to the others, too. Wonder Stories was a grubby kind of magazine, full of self-glorifying little digs at the competition, such as long lists of titles of stories published in other magazines under the heading "Stories We Reject Appear Elsewhere." (Don Wollheim said it should have read "Stories We Don't Pay For Appear Elsewhere.") Yet it had two things going for it. One was that the major find of the mid-30s, a new
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