Introduction

The images for these magazines have been reproduced by kind permission of Earl Kemp. You can see larger versions of them at Earl's web site e.I. at efanzines.com, also a great deal more information about the two magazines, the publisher Bill Hamling and other characters associated with the magazines.

Both of these magazines were published by William Lawrence Hamling's Greenleaf Publishing Company. Imagination ran for 63 issues from October 1950 to October 1958, while Imaginative Tales ran for 26 issues from September 1954 to November 1958, the last three issues under the title "Space Travel" but continuing the numbering of of IMT.

IMG was from the outset intended as a straightforward SF magazine. IMT joined it in 1954, at first featuring the somewhat risqué adventures of Toffee by Charles F Myers, then long fantasy stories by Robert Bloch. The first half dozen issues of IMG were distinguished by covers by Harold McCauley featuring girls with not too many clothes. By 1955, it too had become a mainstream SF magazine. Besides McCauley, all but a handful of IMG and IMT covers were painted by W E Terry, Malcolm Smith or Lloyd Rognan.

IMG and IMT are as interesting for the entertaining characters involved in their publication as they are as magazines in their own right. Bill Hamling also founded "Rogue", one of the early US men's magazines, and went on to develop a soft porn publishing empire that ran him foul of the FBI and landed him in jail, along with Earl Kemp, provider of these scans. You can find a great deal more about these adventures at Earl's web site. The images themselves have an interesting history. Earl published them in a recent issue of his e-zine as a tribute to Bill Hamling, and the magazines they were scanned from were originally Hamling's personal file copies.