Darwination

Couple shots of part of the living room!
 



 
 
 

I took the time to read through this whole thread today, wow.  There are some really great items in here and many bits on Lovecraft I wasn't aware of.
I was hoping to see a run of Home Brew, though
I've hunted that magazine for years (as a scanner/archivist, not as an HPL collector) with next to no sightings.  There are two appearances of the first issue at Heritage (one in a mixed lot of SF softcovers) but no other issues. I've done just a bit more digging just now and added a couple of cover images to my files (and somehow a couple of issues are at Worthpoint I missed, kills me how that happens).
I think the best way to show the nature of the magazine might be to point to a sister publication I've scanned with an edit by my pal McCoy.  It's at the IA here:
https://archive.org/details/high-life-v-03n-04-1923-05.-houtain-darwination-mc-coy-ia
I don't think you'd call Home Brew an amateur magazine - I almost see it as more of a boutique magazine.  Regional magazine may be fair, too, but it was out of Chicago, likely the largest hub of magazines at the time not in the northeast.  High-Life is a mix of art and literature and girlie pics/slightly risque content that was driving so much of the magazine market at the time, and I imagine Home Brew was the same.  Anyways, I'll share the images I do have re: the Lovecraft material. 
Phil Stephensen-Payne says at his magazine index of the pub in his typical entertaining fashion, "Intended as a slightly saucy humour magazine but now remembered only for the serialization of Lovecraft's "Grewsome Tales" ("Herbert West -- Reanimator") and "The Lurking Fear."
Looking at his index I see about ten separate issues that include Lovecraft, but there easily could be more It looks like the first issues each have a chapter of Herbert West: Reanimator
Do excuse if this isn't very sexy, but I'm just gonna run down what I've got in the way of images that may (or may not) enlighten.  I may never track down scanning issues but sharing the images I do have here and now is at least something.
Home Brew 1922-02 v01n01 front cover

Absolutely charming cover design.  Fictionmags notes this one has "From the Dark" - and aggravatingly the indexer does not index the rest of the magazine outside of HPL, for shame
Back cover of the same issue (notably a national advertisement)

Home Brew 1922-03 v01n02 NO COVER IMAGE, hook me up if you have it
Fictionmags notes inclusion of HPL's The Plague Demon.
Home Brew 1922-04.Houtain v01n03 cover Tepper

Home Brew 1922-04.Houtain v01n03  contents
f
Featuring Six Shots by Moonlight by H.P.L.  Also note here illustration by Art Helfant who was in a variety of magazines throughout the decades as well an artist in the comics of the golden age.  On the left, the magazine boasts a 2,000,000 circulation.  This seems high to me, but I've run into other publications from the 20s with similarly high stated circulations that are just as ghosty. Very neat graphics.
The first HPL page

The back cover

Home Brew 1922-05 v01n04 NO COVER IMAGE, hook me up if you have it
Fictionmags shows inclusion HPL's The Scream of the Dead
Home Brew 1922-06 v01n05 cover (tiny image, can't make out the cover artist sig)

Fictionmags shows HPL's Six Shots by Moonlight
Home Brew 1922-07 v01n06 cover Tepper

Fictionmags shows this issue concluding Reanimator with The Tomb Legions.
The record gets a little more spotty here with a lack of cover images over the next few months and no indexed HPL (I'm totally assuming if there was HPL within, these magazines would have been tracked down).  If you have cover images for these months, do let me know.
Home Brew 1922-11 cover Dash (no HPL here but I'm including a front and back cover, itty though they may be)


Home Brew 1922-12.Houtain v02n05 cover Dash.  So this is another HPL item of import, there's no fiction but an early picture as well as some hype.

Home Brew 1922-12.Houtain v02n05 indicia Lovecraft portrait and ballyhoo, no dark circles at the eyes that eye can see, just a puckered grin.  Also in the contents Jack Woodford who at this time might have also been writing for another Chicago magazine, 10-Story Book, edited by Harry Stephen Keeler.  Woodford may be most famous today for his writings on writing, but he was prolific in the girlie pulps and his paperback editions show up in our paperback thread quite often.


Home Brew 1923-01 v02n06 cover Dash

The Lurking Fear begins (Part 1 of 4)
Home Brew 1923-02 cover Dash

The Lurking Fear Part 2.  I've got a couple images of the text for this.  Illustration by Clark Ashton Smith


Home Brew 1923-03 cover Dash

includes part 3 of The Lurking Fear
Home Brew 1923-04 cover Dash

Includes Part 4 of The Lurking Fear
I believe the following May issue (if it exists) is the final issue of the magazine (shoot me a cover image if you have one!)
There is a 1972 publication that has much or all of the Lurking Fear material from Home Brew which had a run of 500, by the way.  I don't own it but have five sample images.  It's nice to know that Brown has a full run of these magazines. A lasting and complete public archiving of this peculiar magazine cover to cover will likely require a visit to this or some other library that holds all the issues - unless one of you collectors is holding





 

That one looks good.  Somehow the teal cover still manages to come off as menacing (a neat design), and a good cop pushed over the edge never gets old
Woolfolk sure covered a lot of area.  I saw a horror pb c.1980, romances, political thrillers, courtroom procedurals... His late interviews make it sound like he slightly resented being best known for his comics over his novels, but he must have been pretty respected to pull down 300 a week in the GA for comics scripts. 

In a not unusual occurrence, I came across some interesting tidbits after digging a little deeper into a paperback upon working with the cover image (painting by Harry Barton)

The confluence across pop culture mediums is once again strong with the author, as I hadn't heard of him as a prolific comic scribe who worked for D.C., Timely-Atlas, Quality, Fawcett, Archie, and other publishers during the golden age.  His wiki links his NYT obit where Lou Fine calls him "The Shakespeare of Comics." 
Alter Ego 158 has a nice lead article on him followed by a checklist article of his comics work.  I'll clip the intro here just to show the breadth of his comics contributions.  Also of interest to myself is the fact he was the publisher (or maybe more properly the editor from what I'm seeing in indicias) of Inside Story, purportedly the #2 competitor to Robert Harrison's all time classic gossip rag Confidential (and later he edited Space World for pal Otto Binder).  The number of existing copies of Inside Story seems to back the claim up, but I'd have to see some hard numbers to believe it (there were A LOT of Confidential clones).  Later there was TV as well, as he was lead writer on The Defenders (a highly respected law show I'm not familiar with) as well as Arrest and Trial an hour and a half show that was a protype of Law & Order where you see cops in the first half and D.A.s in the second.

I couldn't find any pulp entries (which doesn't mean he didn't try his hand under an alias), but working in comics, magazines, paperbacks, and TV shows a lot of flexibility/adaptability to changing markets and tastes (and how contacts in one area can lead to work in another).  Looking forward to reading Way of the Wicked, especially now wondering if he's got any particular insights or experiences he used from his time at Inside Story in the novel.  Opinion of the Court is apparently the book he was proudest of.  I think I'll start with this juicier one, though
 

Sickos!
Definitely in the tradition of slasher films and the like where old ugly people torture young beautiful people (women specifically) in varied and inventive ways.  
There's a number of classic WM covers, and they should get appropriate PCH type level of respect.  Of all the WM covers in the last couple posts, I wonder if the most iconic is also the least sensational:

On the classic tip,  I'd mentioned that November 1933 Brundage as my #1 fave from her (and don't really quibble with Eric and Sarge's assessment, her best stuff has to do with simple composition - even if I like her style, too).  If you limit the number of classics to 50, and no need to be totally arbitrary, I imagine you'd still get at least a few Brundages (one of which would probably have to be REH related).  For Weird Tales, I  also think you'd have to include a Houdini issue or Monsters of the Pit (as wonderfully primitive as they may be) from the earliest Weird Tales as a representative classic as well as Finlay's Sea-Witch.  Arguments could be made for inclusion of some representatives of later artists too.  The Astounding At the Mountains of Madness is a lock.  It's pretty good, but it *has* to get the nod as maybe the most famous HPL entry in the pulps.  The Saunders test tube girl on Marvel Science Stories gets the definite nod (at one point that was the highest selling piece of pulp OA - very easily could be mistaken) but maybe gets to be the lone representative of test tube women  (outside of maybe a Bok I'm thinking about ).  I think the bottom Planet Stories is classic, too. I'm not sure if it's not as "hot" as it once was, but heat probably shouldn't be too much of a factor here.

Twinsies! (the pulp is so much better)
 

Sickos!
Definitely in the tradition of slasher films and the like where old ugly people torture young beautiful people (women specifically) in varied and inventive ways.  
There's a number of classic WM covers, and they should get appropriate PCH type level of respect.  Of all the WM covers in the last couple posts, I wonder if the most iconic is also the least sensational:

On the classic tip,  I'd mentioned that November 1933 Brundage as my #1 fave from her (and don't really quibble with Eric and Sarge's assessment, her best stuff has to do with simple composition - even if I like her style, too).  If you limit the number of classics to 50, and no need to be totally arbitrary, I imagine you'd still get at least a few Brundages (one of which would probably have to be REH related).  For Weird Tales, I  also think you'd have to include a Houdini issue or Monsters of the Pit (as wonderfully primitive as they may be) from the earliest Weird Tales as a representative classic as well as Finlay's Sea-Witch.  Arguments could be made for inclusion of some representatives of later artists too.  The Astounding At the Mountains of Madness is a lock.  It's pretty good, but it *has* to get the nod as maybe the most famous HPL entry in the pulps.  The Saunders test tube girl on Marvel Science Stories gets the definite nod (at one point that was the highest selling piece of pulp OA - very easily could be mistaken) but maybe gets to be the lone representative of test tube women  (outside of maybe a Bok I'm thinking about ).  I think the bottom Planet Stories is classic, too. I'm not sure if it's not as "hot" as it once was, but heat probably shouldn't be too much of a factor here.

I have always loved solid 6.0 books for that exact reason. For a lot of stuff there are high grade chasers and low grade buyers that can’t afford the high grade stuff. Stuff in the middle often used to be overlooked. I buy the book not the grade. I have everything from coverless to Mile High copies. But my sweet spot is 5.0-7.0.

New one in today.  Didn't have that little chip bottom left before being shipped by a novice seller (and it could have been worse considering how it was shipped), but whatcanyado, ain't kickin the poor girl out or anything

You don't want to get on her bad side, anyways o.O

Twinsies! (the pulp is so much better)
 

Nice lush colors on this one...

This one's interesting -- printed in silver ink. Shiny.
 

In a not unusual occurrence, I came across some interesting tidbits after digging a little deeper into a paperback upon working with the cover image (painting by Harry Barton)

The confluence across pop culture mediums is once again strong with the author, as I hadn't heard of him as a prolific comic scribe who worked for D.C., Timely-Atlas, Quality, Fawcett, Archie, and other publishers during the golden age.  His wiki links his NYT obit where Lou Fine calls him "The Shakespeare of Comics." 
Alter Ego 158 has a nice lead article on him followed by a checklist article of his comics work.  I'll clip the intro here just to show the breadth of his comics contributions.  Also of interest to myself is the fact he was the publisher (or maybe more properly the editor from what I'm seeing in indicias) of Inside Story, purportedly the #2 competitor to Robert Harrison's all time classic gossip rag Confidential (and later he edited Space World for pal Otto Binder).  The number of existing copies of Inside Story seems to back the claim up, but I'd have to see some hard numbers to believe it (there were A LOT of Confidential clones).  Later there was TV as well, as he was lead writer on The Defenders (a highly respected law show I'm not familiar with) as well as Arrest and Trial an hour and a half show that was a protype of Law & Order where you see cops in the first half and D.A.s in the second.

I couldn't find any pulp entries (which doesn't mean he didn't try his hand under an alias), but working in comics, magazines, paperbacks, and TV shows a lot of flexibility/adaptability to changing markets and tastes (and how contacts in one area can lead to work in another).  Looking forward to reading Way of the Wicked, especially now wondering if he's got any particular insights or experiences he used from his time at Inside Story in the novel.  Opinion of the Court is apparently the book he was proudest of.  I think I'll start with this juicier one, though
 

Little Lotta #95 VG- cover split about 1” at top. CofC #19 my @ss this is a classic Harvey cover! $4

I had an Airbnb like this once...
 

The v01n01 and not a bad copy, but a funky darkish stripe over the center across the center of the book FPS cover.

Lovely cover. 
 

This book's had a hard life, but way cool cover.

That one looks good.  Somehow the teal cover still manages to come off as menacing (a neat design), and a good cop pushed over the edge never gets old
Woolfolk sure covered a lot of area.  I saw a horror pb c.1980, romances, political thrillers, courtroom procedurals... His late interviews make it sound like he slightly resented being best known for his comics over his novels, but he must have been pretty respected to pull down 300 a week in the GA for comics scripts. 

My first Canteen Kate
 

Recent Heritage win.  Hard to get a good photo. 

Run While You Can by William Woolfolk    Popular Library  790  1956   Raymond Johnson cover art.