His choices are quite illuminating in that he did not have a dozen anthologies to sift through as we would today. From 1925 to 1928 Wright chose only classics of fantasy & horror from the back-list of the classics.
Lovecraft stories from the early Edwin Baird days of the Weird Tales. Fans like Henry Kuttner (who later became an author) campaigned hard for the reprint being taken from previous issues of the magazine rather than old material from England or France. While some liked having access to the old stories, other readers said the pages of the reprints were wasted. He might have inadvertently given some readers an education in the classics, but the move was purely financial. Wright used it as a way to save money, by using public domain or cheap cost reprints.
Ghost stories and horror tales had been around for centuries. Farnsworth Wright did not have the same problem. In this way, he also taught a whole new crop of writers what Science Fiction was. Hugo Gernsback survived his first years of Amazing Stories using Verne, Wells and Edgar Rice Burroughs reprints. Reprints in Pulp magazines were not uncommon. The Weird Tales Reprint story was a controversial part of the Unique Magazine’s history.
