Otherwise known to us non-German speaking visitors as “The World’s First Fantasy Magazine” which began publication in 1919 and ran for only 2 years, but still published 4 years before Weird Tales was ever created. It was largely, as you can tell by its covers below, a supernatural horror publication with tendencies of fantasy, I can guarantee it was still good. They rotated between re-publishing old stories and illustrations as well as then contemporary authors and artists so it was a refreshing collection work. There is a surprisingly limited about of information on the magazine itself, despite its cult status with certain audiences (you can actually buy T-Shirts imprinted with some of these covers, if you REALLY wanted to impress your Underground-German-Fantasy-Dark Horror-1910-Vintage-borderline Depression friends), so I will just let the art speak for itself.

I’m really digging the limited print style they have going here, with no more than 2-3 colors for any of the covers (normally) and the woodblock style printing is very German, with its harsh angles and angry, creepy subtleties. I really love the designs on most of these, and being a huge fan of such graphic work and things that go bump in the night, these appeal to me nicely. Some get a little hard to read as the drawings or compositions just don’t mesh with the contrasting colors, but for the most part they are really cool snippets of something I definitely would have read if I was alive then. Its nice to see such evolution and transference from older ideas to today.