Sometimes “oops” can mean collectibility.
Take, for instance, the famous “inverted Jenny” postage stamp. The stamp’s upside down frame (rather than the plane) and its rarity make it a very valuable stamp.
But curiously, I rarely see mention of one glaring “oops” in the pulp world: the cover of the first number of Weird Tales.
Rural Publications got the colors wrong on quite a few copies of the March 1923 cover.
As you can see, the cover of Weird Tales — which is celebrating its 90th anniversary this year — on the left looks a bit odd.
The orange color emphases the wrong elements in the illustration by Richard Epperley and the title blurb. It almost looks like a negative image.
The cover on the right fixes things by coloring the skin of the man and woman (and leaving the octopus more eerie looking) and calling attention to the title. And the octopus looks more threatening.
Putting the color plates on the wrong press units happens from time to time. In the newspaper business, eagle-eyed press operators always carefully check the first few copies for this problem (and many others) as the press slowly starts up.
Should a plate error occur, the press is quickly stopped, and the printing plates are swapped. Then the presses resume. The bad copies are chucked into the recycle bin, never making it out of the door. Meanwhile, the presses pick up speed as more and more clean copies roll off.
The cash-strapped Rural Publishing probably couldn’t toss away hundreds of color covers and just reprint them. Heck, within a year, it was teetering on bankruptcy.
While a dozen bad copies may cost a newspaper company a few cents each over tens of thousands copies in a pressrun, problems with a pulp cover — if not caught quickly — could cost a pulp publisher much more.
As a result, it appears there are more copies of the mistake than there are of the corrected cover. So instead of the “oops” becoming collectible, the more sought-after one is the properly printed version of Weird Tales‘ first number.
Gee Whiz, William I have always thought it was tough enough finding the first issue without you making it tougher. Just kidding. The late Richard Minter once told me that one of the later issues was more difficult to find than the first issue. I think it was the third but I can’t be sure.
I believe it’s the second issue which is notoriously even more difficult to find than the first.
Girasol Collectibles has of course produced replicas of the first couple of dozen issues of WEIRD TALES (and many other pulps), and they did separate replicas for each of the first issue variant covers. I’ll admit I’m not a fanatic enough collector to pay $35 each to have both variants (and certainly not fanatic enough to try to find originals of either at the prices they bring these days….)
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