Amazing Stories
Amazing Stories, first published in April 1926, was the first magazine devoted entirely to science fiction – or ‘scientifiction’ as founding editor Hugo Gernsback called it:
By ‘scientifiction’ I mean the Jules Verne, H. G. Wells and Edgar Allan Poe type of story — a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision … Not only do these amazing tales make tremendously interesting reading—they are always instructive. They supply knowledge . . . in a very palatable form … New adventures pictured for us in the scientifiction of today are not at all impossible of realization tomorrow … Many great science stories destined to be of historical interest are still to be written … Posterity will point to them as having blazed a new trail, not only in literature and fiction, but progress as well.
— Hugo Gernsback, Amazing Stories, April 1926
Artist Frank R. Paul, who had worked with Gernsback since 1914, painted 38 covers for the magazine from it’s first issue in April 1926 until June 1929 when Gernsback lost control of the magazine; he followed Gernsback to his later magazines Air Wonder Stories, Science Wonder Stories and Wonder Stories, plus the associated quarterlies, which together published another 103 of his covers between June 1929 to April 1936.