For the twenty years after Hugo Gernsback willed a field of Scientifiction into existence with Amazing, stories didn't so much appear in the magazines as disappear into them. Thousands of stories in all the pulp fields flickered for the brief time span of a newsstand cover date before the inevitable hewing by the grim reaper of the next issue. A tiny handful of fans hoarded these magazines knowing that a lost issue was forever.

 

Where there's a market there's a pioneer looking to exploit it. In 1941 Phil Stong, a veteran newspaperman and novelist — his first novel, State Fair, would generate three movies — ventured into the field for the first and only time with The Other Worlds: The Best Modern Stories of Imagination since Dracula and Frankenstein. The title gives away the fantasy bent and the introduction slams us with his personal views — “there are not a dozen [interplanetary] stories with even mild originality or amusement value” — but the names include Lester del Ray, Theodore Sturgeon, Stanley G. Weinbaum, and Murray Leinster. They live up to "Modern" as well. Every story first appeared between 1933 and 1940 except for H. P. Lovecraft's 1925 "In the Belt." A handful of other now-famous hardback anthologies appeared over the next few years, as well as The Pocket Book of Science Fiction, a 1943 one-shot edited by Donald A. Wollheim.

 

Mystery, western, and romance buffs had the satisfaction of knowing that their favorite reads appeared in novel form. SF and fantasy fans lacked even that consolation. No writers of what we today would consider mainstream SF had more than a very long shot of seeing their works published between hardcovers before the end of World War II. By 1946 a couple of mainstream presses held their noses and cautiously entered the market, although they were more likely to fall back upon standard fantasy or dystopias like The Murder of the U.S.A., published under Leinster's real name of Will F. Jenkins in 1946. True fans wanted SF that was true SF. "[I]t always ends up with the spaceship," as Willy Ley wrote in an introduction to a Gnome Press title. Think of as many exceptions as you want, SF and spaceships were synonymous then and remain so today.

 

Fans with a bit of money saved up from the bounteous war years rushed in to fill the gap with small presses that would not merely reprint all-but-lost stories from the pulps but offer a new and paying market for original novels, often with beautiful jacket illustrations by top artists who appreciated the more sophisticated work that hardbacks allowed over pulp covers. Martin Greenberg wasn't first, but he thought the biggest. Gnome Press put out more books, lasted longer, had bigger print runs, and surrounded books with more promotion than any of the other SF presses, a vision financed by frequent lack of actual payments that made Greenberg the most reviled publisher in the field. To this day you have to be careful to distinguish the noted anthologist Martin H. Greenberg from the noted crook Martin Greenberg. Greenberg meant well. Bad luck and bad timing were his downfalls more than outright larceny. He owed so much to his printer that the printer kept him in business long after the bottom had fallen out just in the hope that the next book or the one after that would finally make enough money to cover his bills.

 

None of this could be known at the beginning. Although his first two books were the original fantasy novel The Carnelian Cube, by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, and The Porcelain Magician, a collection of older fantasy tales by then-big name Frank Owen, the field started taking note in 1949 with a string of major titles: Pattern of Conquest, an SF novel by George O. Smith serialized in 1946 in Astounding; Sixth Column, the revised edition of Robert A. Heinlein's 1941 Astounding serial under his Anson MacDonald pen name; William Gray Beyer's Minions of the Moon, first published as a three-part serial in Argosy in 1939; I, Robot, Isaac Asimov's collected robot stories; and Cosmic Engineers, another 1939 serial, this one from Clifford D. Simak and originally published in Astounding, all by the end of 1950. Greenberg himself edited an anthology of — what else? — space stories, titled Men Against the Stars and including such names as Asimov, Leinster, A. E. van Vogt, Hal Clement, C. L. Moore and Henry Kuttner writing as Lewis Padgett, and E. Mayne Hull. Both C. L. and E. Mayne were woman (probably: some evidence can be found that van Vogt wrote the Hull stories that wound up being published under his wife's name), and so were Gnome novelists Wilmar Shiras, Leigh Brackett, and Andrew North (Andre Norton). Despite that, Moore, Shiras, and Brackett were forthrightly referred to as shes on the flaps of their books and Judith Merill did a series of anthologies (and had a story picked for one of Greenberg's) No evidence exists that these women had to hide their identities because of prejudices among editors or readers.