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He printed the stories the pulps were too squeamish to buy

In the mid-1930s a young science fiction fan named William Crawford, who happened to own his own printing press, decided to do what the professional pulp magazines wouldn't: publish stories too strange, too sexual, or too religious for their editors' taste. He couldn't pay his contributors, so he offered them a lifetime subscription instead, and announced his venture with a flyer that included a page from a story rejected elsewhere for its sexual content. That flyer, aimed at fellow fans, may even have nudged professional editors toward looser policies of their own. His first title, Unusual Stories, barely got off the ground, arriving in incomplete installments before he shifted his energy into a new magazine, Marvel Tales.

Over the next two years Crawford managed five issues of Marvel Tales and three of Unusual Stories, slowly improving their production quality and page counts as he went. Despite his shoestring operation, he attracted real talent: an early Lovecraft story previously confined to an amateur magazine, the only print appearance of a Robert E. Howard tale under a pseudonym, a young Robert Bloch's first published fiction, and a Clifford Simak story too religious for the professional markets. He also ran a story contest, serialized longer works, and built toward something more ambitious, announcing plans for newsstand distribution, a line of books, and story pamphlets featuring other soon-to-be notable writers. But his resources never matched his ideas, and after the Summer 1935 issue of Marvel Tales the magazines quietly stopped, leaving several announced projects, including an expanded relaunch with newsstand circulation, unrealized.

Historians of the genre have generally judged Crawford's gamble a noble failure: he proved that worthwhile stories existed outside the pulps' narrow taste, but lacked the money to turn that proof into a lasting commercial magazine. One critic called the magazine a fascinating experiment that might have changed the direction of science fiction had it survived, while others credit Crawford as the figure who tried hardest to bridge the divide between amateur fan publishing and the professional magazine world. A later anthology drew together some of the best material from the run, and decades afterward a facsimile edition let readers revisit the full, scrappy history of the enterprise. What remains is less a polished magazine than a record of ambition outrunning means, kept alive today mainly in library archives and the memories of science fiction's early historians.

The promotional flyer for the magazine came with a sample page from P. Schuyler Miller's "The Titan" — a story no professional magazine would buy because of its sexual content.

Read the whole of Marvel Tales and Unusual Stories on Wikipedia

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