Avon Fantasy Reader No. 13
Edited by Donald A. Wollheim
Avon Novels Inc.
1950
1^st Printing

     Another one of my favorite covers, illustrating the Frank Belknap Long story, which, although it is science fiction, was originally published in Weird Tales in 1935.
     If issue #11 was an experiment in lesser known authors, this issue is packed with them. Besides the Long cover featured story, there are tales by Sewel Peaslee Wright, Ray Cummings, S. Fowler Wright, August Derleth, Donald Wandrei, Mary Elizabeth Counselman, and Clifford Simak w/Carl Jacobi, all authors with great popularity in the pulp era and most of whom are still remembered today. In addition, there are also stories by lesser known, or forgotten, authors Albert R. Wetjen, Charles W. Diffin, Julius Long and Beatrice Grimshaw (an Irish author who spins a tale of a ghost on a South Sea island).
     One might be tempted to call this one of the best issues in the entire run and, from a quality stand point, it is. However, all the material in this issue, and the later issues of the run, is pretty well divided by genre with very little of the cross-genre mix of the early issues, which was something that made The Reader unique. The reprinting of a variety of genres may have been what allowed The Reader to survive as long as it did in an era when most genre magazines were dying off. Readers were turning more and more to paperback books and publishers, in response, were channeling more genre fiction into the new market.