Schiff's early influences included the story of Aladdin, the Gorgon and the Cyclops, Edgar Allan Poe, Weird Tales and Lee Brown Coye.
[2] Among the fiction writers featured in the magazine were Manly Wade Wellman, Fritz Leiber, Robert Bloch, Ramsey Campbell, and Karl Edward Wagner.
The magazine won the first "Howard" or World Fantasy Award for non-professional publishing in 1975, though it was clearly on a professional level in editorial content and production.
[1] Beginning in 1978, an anthology series, drawing on work published in the magazine and mixing some new material, was published in hardcover by Doubleday and then in paperback by Playboy Press, soon after absorbed by Berkley/Putnam, which began a trend of parallel publication of increasingly infrequent issues of the magazine and a string of anthologies with an ever-larger proportion of original fiction.
Several other publications were issued, most in both trade and signed/numbered/slipcased editions (including Robert Bloch's Cthulhu Mythos novel Strange Eons), all showing an appreciation of fine bookmaking and quality workmanship.