Introduction

Analog Science Fiction and Fact is still available and you can find its web site at www.analogsf.com

In the article on FSF, I described it as the "Queen of science fiction magazines" and if that is so, ASF must surely be the king. Its longevity is exceeded only by Weird Tales and Amazing, but without the irregular schedules and lengthy gaps in publication suffered by those magazines, and in number of issues it nearly equals the two of them put together (at April 2005, 898 issues against 336 and 608). It still has the highest circulation of any of the three mass-market SF digests (ASF 33,000, Asimov's 25,000, FSF 19,000). Moreover, it benefits from the resources of Dell Magazines which publishes not only ASF but also Asimov's Science Fiction and the Ellery Queen's and Alfred Hitchcock's mystery magazines, as well as a wide range of puzzle, crossword and logic magazines. For a large part of its life, it was part of the Street and Smith publishing empire, also a large and resourceful publishing company with a wide portfolio of magazines.

Possibly one of the main reasons for Analog's continued survival and success is a consistent editorial policy over a long period of time. From 1938 to 1971, it was edited by John W Campbell jr., certainly the most famous and influential and, I think, the longest serving of all SF editors. His towering influence shaped not only Astounding (as it was until 1960) but the careers of many leading authors and, through them, the whole field of science fiction. What is less well known is that, since 1978, Analog has again had a single editor, Stanley Schmidt, who is probably therefore the second longest serving SF editor. It is impressive that a magazine that has survived for more than 75 years has, for 60 of them, been directed by just two men. (Gardner Dozois, by the way, has edited Asimov's for nearly two decades, so Dell certainly seem to believe in backing their editors).

Cover Artists

Astounding/Analog has attracted most of the top SF cover artists over the years, as one would expect of the magazine that for long had the highest circulation of any SF title. Like Fantasy & Science Fiction, however, most of the covers were done by a relatively small band of favoured artists - certainly until the 1970s, though it has distributed its favours more widely in recent years. By far its most prolific artist was Frank Kelly Freas, whose output for ASF spanned nearly 50 years. His first cover appeared on the October 1953 issue, his last on February 2003 and he did 126 in all. This means that he did more than 20% of all the covers over those five decades, and nearly a third of them through his most productive period in the 50s, 60s and 70s.

Of the leading ASF artists, though, Freas was unusual in that his contribution extended over such a long time. In its early years, one artist would typically do a long run of covers then fall out of favour. Wessolowski, for example, did the first 34 covers straight, i.e., all of those under the Clayton regime. When Street and Smith took over, Wesso was dropped and replaced by Howard V Brown, who then did the next 44 in a row. He then alternated with Wessolowski (who made a brief come-back) and a couple of other artists in 1937-38, then disappeared entirely. ASF experimented for a while before introducing Hubert Rogers in 1939, who then established himself as the new house artist and painted every cover from April 1940 to August 1942. He was in turn supplanted by William Timmins, who was responsible for almost every cover through to the end of 1946. After this, the policy of relying on a single artist was dropped and the only one to approach this level of dominance again was John Schoenherr in the 1960s. This was a common practice in the early days of SF&F magazines - compare, for example, Frank Paul at Wonder Stories, Margaret Brundage at Weird Tales or Bergey at Startling Stories.

The following is a table of the top ten artists contributing covers to ASF with a breakdown of the number of covers they did by decade.

The Changing Face of Analog

Probably more has been written about ASF than any other magazine and it is very well researched and documented, so there is very little that I can add that cannot be found elsewhere. However, there is one story that is perhaps better told in pictures than in words and that is the changing name and appearance of the magazine over its long life. If you click here or on "The Face of ASF" in the left-hand sidebar, you will see this story illustrated through a series of images of the ASF title bar from 1930 to the present day.

Frequency of Publication

ASF has the longest record of continuous monthly publication of any SF magazine, though the interpretation of "monthly" has varied over the years. Under the Clayton Magazines regime it was published monthly from January 1930 through to the middle of 1932, then became increasingly irregular until the last Clayton issue of March 1933. Then there was a seven month hiatus before Street and Smith took over with the October issue and ASF appeared with perfect monthly regularity until January 1981. There was a brief flirtation with a four-weekly schedule that gave 13 issues in 1981, reverting to monthly in 1982 but with the addition of a mid-September number, so there were still thirteen issues in the year. The extra issue moved to mid-December from 1984 to 1995, then was dropped in 1996, which had just twelve monthly issues again. From 1997 on, July and August were combined into a "special double issue" so the frequency fell to eleven a year, and in 2004 the same happened to the January and February numbers, so now there are just ten.

The Impostor

In 1970, two issues of a magazine called first "Astounding Stories Yearbook" and then "Astounding SF" appeared. This must count as one of the most outrageously cheeky bits of opportunism in the history of magazine science fiction, as these had absolutely nothing to do with ASF and were reprint magazines produced by the Ultimate Publishing Co. of Flushing, NY. This company had taken over "Amazing" and "Fantastic" and had acquired the rights to their back catalogue, from which they produced a bewildering variety of reprint titles drawing on old stories from these magazines. "Astounding Stories Yearbook" (ASY in my index) was one of these.

Source of Images

Most of the early issues were seen for sale on eBay and the scans have been borrowed from there. A number have been copied with permission from Jacques Hamon's "Collector's Showcase" and many were scanned for me by Ron Kihara, Ned Brooks and Yutaka Morita. To each of them, many thanks. The most recent issues are scanned from my own collection, but half a dozen are missing - can anyone provide good, mailing-label free scans of these:?

• 2002: Jul/Aug, Dec
• 2003: Jan, Jun, Jul/Aug
• 2004: Sep

Please contact me if you can help.