The Black Cat (US magazine)

The Black Cat was an American fiction magazine launched in 1895 by Herman Umbstaetter, initially published in Boston, Massachusetts.

Others who sold stories to The Black Cat included O. Henry, Rex Stout, and Clark Ashton Smith.

The Black Cat was founded by Herman Umbstaetter, who had become wealthy in the advertising and publishing business in Baltimore by the late 1880s.

[1][2][3][note 1] In 1886, he attempted to start a magazine in Boston, proposing to price it at ten cents, but was unable to get funding.

[8][note 2] The American News Company said in early 1896 that "no magazine ever published at any price has secured so large a sale in so short a time".

[23] After the next competition, which ended in July 1905 with an announcement that the planned prize amount of $10,600 would be expanded to $12,500,[24][25] The Journalist published an article about Umbstaetter's methods.

[26] Stanley Johnson, the author of the article, had visited Umbstaetter's home in Back Bay, Boston multiple times during the second half of 1904, while the contest manuscripts were arriving.

[26] The next contest, the last to be run under Umbstaetter's editorship, was launched in April 1908, offering a smaller prize pool than the previous two competitions: $6,950 for ten stories.

[1][31] Cassino moved the publishing offices to Salem, Massachusetts,[1] and hired Theresa Dyer, who had been Umbstaetter's chief assistant, as editor.

At about the time she left, the circulation manager of Metropolitan Magazine, T. H. Kelly, began negotiating with Cassino to purchase The Black Cat.

He soon found the business side of running the magazine took up too much of his time, and brought Bessom back as a reader, and eventually as the editor.

[37][38][39] The plan was to release one picture a week, starting on December 5, 1916, with "The Egg", a comedy starring Richard Travers and Marguerite Clayton.

[41][42] In October 1919, Herman Cassino sold the magazine to a company owned by Fox Film;[32][43] the change took effect with the December 1919 issue.

[44] The address changed from Salem to New York, the page count increased from about 60 to over 140,[44] and a new story contest was announced, with prizes totaling $5,000.

[29] It reappeared in January 1922, this time published by William Kane, the owner of The Editor, a magazine for amateur writers.

[1] Kane, who was based in Highland Falls, New York, edited the magazine himself, and produced 18 more digest-sized issues, initially at fortnightly intervals;[29][33][46] circulation was now estimated to be only 15,000.

[32] This typically did not include horror: in his guidance to writers he said "we especially desire stories, in the handling of which the morbid, unnatural and unpleasant are avoided rather than emphasized".

[50] Umbstaetter sued and won damages from several publishers who had reprinted the story, and printed some of the correspondence in The Black Cat.

[50][56] Recounting the events in 1920, Bessom commented that the papers that reprinted it and "hailed [it] as one of the best stories" of the day had paid it no such compliments when it had first been printed.

To settle the bet, Barnes wrote two stories, and submitted them both to The Black Cat, one under his own name, and one under the pseudonym "S. C. Brean".

[43][59] Magazine historian Mike Ashley comments that "The Mysterious Card" was the most famous story to appear in The Black Cat, but that the sequel "would have been best left unwritten";[43] and according to Bessom's account of the magazine's history, written in 1920, writers of his day agreed that Moffett "spoiled his story by writing the sequel".

[66][67] London was living in poverty at the time, sending out stories in the hope of getting paid one cent per word, which he had read was the usual rate for fiction.

[67] London's story was not the only one about a scientific invention; early examples include "My Invisible Friend" (February 1897), by Katherine Kip, about invisibility; "Ely's Automatic Housemaid" (December 1899), by Elizabeth Bellamy, featuring a robot; and "The Man Who Found Zero" (September 1901), by Ion Arnold, about space travel.

[43] Clark Ashton Smith, later well-known as a writer of fantastic fiction, contributed two adventure stories with an oriental setting towards the end of Umbstaetter's time as editor.

[68] Stories on science fiction themes disappeared almost completely after Umbstaetter sold the magazine; the last notable speculative fiction story was by Harry Stephen Keeler, whose "John Jones's Dollar", in the August 1915 issue, was set in the year 3221, with the compound interest on money invested in 1921 amounting to enough to buy the entire solar system.

[43][69][70] Other well-known writers who appeared in The Black Cat included Rex Stout, O. Henry, Rupert Hughes, Susan Glaspell, Ellis Parker Butler, Holman Day, and Octavus Roy Cohen.

[44][72] The Black Cat was "highly influential and much imitated by other magazines", according to Ashley, who lists The White Owl, The Smart Set, The Thrill Book and Weird Tales as examples.

[75] No statements of ownership were published during 1914, [note 6] but two bibliographic sources, Mike Ashley and Phil Stephensen-Payne, give Kelly as the editor for 1914.