Science Fiction & Fantasy at Special Collections

Astounding Stories was part of the stable of magazines produced by Clayton Magazines, Inc., which also published Ace-High Magazine, Ranch Romances, Cowboy Stories, Clues, Five Novels Monthly, Rangeland Love Story Magazine, Western Adventures, Strange Tales, Complete Western Love Novelettes, Complete Mystery Novelettes, Complete Adventure Novelettes, My Love Story Magazine, and Bunk.

All of the Clayton titles appealed to the desperate desires of the Great Depression era. They also exploited (or perhaps defensively reacted to) a growing demand for censorship in the late 1920s and early 1930s resulting from the increasingly explicit movies of the 1920s and the lurid pulp and magazine trade. These issues were addressed by the "Clayton Standard," printed in every issue of their magazines:

• "That the stories therein are clean, interesting, vivid, by leading writers of the day and purchased under conditions approved by the Authors' League of America;
• That such magazines are manufactured in Union shops by American workmen;
• That each newsdealer and agent is ensured a fair profit;
• That an intelligent censorship guards their advertising pages."

"Intelligent" may be a bit of a stretch. Advertisements in this issue included offers to "Clean out Your Kidneys--Win Back Your Pep," give readers a "strange power over men and women" by learning hypnotism at the Paris School of Psychology, and cure deafness.

This issue also included an editorial discussing Edwin Hubble's discovery of an expanding universe. It began:

To be in line with the trend of modern scientific thought, it appears we must accept the dictum that the universe is undergoing a wholesale inflation.

This was written almost fifty years before the inflation theory of cosmology was developed.

When editor John W. Campbell took over in 1938, he changed the emphasis from gadgetry and action per se to writing about how science and technology might actually develop and affect people. This more mature approach soon made Astounding the undisputed leader in its field, and to reflect the magazine's new sophistication, Campbell changed its title from the sensationalist Astounding to Analog.