Some fan, after reading one of Jules Verne's tales in Amazing, wrote in claiming that he was a very promising author! Charles Willard Diffin and C. D. Willard is the same author.... The fastest writer: Arthur J. Burks. The slowest: Edward Elme Smith.... P. Schuyler Miller became a science fiction author as the result of a cover contest.... You can't call Raymond Gallun a half-pint, anyway. (How did that pun get into this column?)... The question is still unsatisfactorily: WHO is Anthony Gilmore???... Allen Glasser's "Captives in Space" in the July, 1932 "The Time Traveller" is a rejected entry of the November, 1929 Science Wonder Stories cover contest.... Two of the titles of H. G. Winter's stories contain the word "ice," which seems quite appropriate.... Sewell Peaslee Wright had a story in Weird years before Astounding. CONTEST RESULTS The winner of last month's cash prize contest is William Sykora, 35-51 41st St., Long Island City, New York. Here is his answer to "Why do you read fantasy fiction?" "Why do I read fantasy fiction? I often wonder. The occult, the fantastic, have always held me with supreme, almost unholy, fascination. I have found that by constant practice, an all-excluding, all-consuming concentration bonds stronger than the strongest steel to all dismally horrible tales of the supernatural. The earthly ties that hold me mentally and morally to a workaday existence, are hypnotically rent asunder by a mesmerism born of steely sharp concentration. Thus do I thrill--quake--and shudder with the delightful ecstasy of bizarre adventure through the awful expanse of the inconceivably terrible unknown universe, and I love it." Because of lack of support, we will not present another cash prize contest, until enough readers ask for one. If we receive enough petitions, we will take great pleasure in featuring another in the near future. SUPERNATURAL HORROR IN LITERATURE by H. P. Lovecraft (Copyright, 1927 by W. Paul Cook) 1. Introduction The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. These facts few psychologists will dispute, and their admitted truth must establish for all time the genuineness and dignity of the weirdly horrible tale as a literary form. Against it are discharged all the shafts of a materialistic sophistication which clings to frequently felt emotions and external events, and a naively insipid idealism which deprecates the aesthetic motive and calls for a didactic literature to "uplift" the reader toward a suitable degree of smirking optimism. But in spite of all this opposition, the weird tale has survived, developed, and attained remarkable heights of perfection; founded as it is on a profound and elementary principle whose appeal, if not always universal, must necessarily be poignant and permanent to minds of the requisite sensitiveness.