A pretty good cover that serves as a reminder that telephones were around earlier than we sometimes think they were. Ray Nafziger, W. Ryerson Johnson, and Bennett Foster are the big names in this issue. The lead novel is by Ney N. Geer, an author whose work I've never read, as far as I recall, although I know I have some pulps with his stories in them.
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Even in 1941 WESTERN STORY was publishing some excellent western fiction and still maintaining a weekly schedule. In fact the magazine had been weekly at this point for about 20 years and the circulation was still high for a pulp title. Not as high as the peak in the 1920's which some say reached 400,000 an issue, but still pretty good.
All this was soon to change as the war time paper restrictions caused Street & Smith to change to the digest format in 1943. This was also the year that WESTERN STORY stopped weekly publication.
Despite the smaller, less impressive size, the magazine continued to do well enough as a digest monthly until the bloodiest day in pulp history in 1949. Street & Smith made the decision to kill all their pulps except for ASTOUNDING.
Popular Publications revived WESTERN STORY a couple years later but the pulp era was over and the end was near.
Despite a brief boom of digest SF and crime fiction magazines, the day of the all fiction magazines was just about over. We are now down to just 5 fiction digests:
F & SF, ASIMOV'S, ANALOG, EQMM, and AHMM.
Back in the 1800s the city with the most phones, after New York, was Deadwood, South Dakota.
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