Der Orchideengarten: The World’s First Fantasy Magazine

'I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best—one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve, momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which for ever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis' - H.P.Lovercraft

Der Orchideengarten

 

The University of Heidelberg has digitized its copies of Der Orchideengarten, the world’s first fantasy fiction magazine. Known as ‘The Orchids-garden’ in English, and subtitled Phantastische Blätter or ‘Fantastic Pages’, this German magazine of weird and creepily erotic fiction ran for 51 issues from January 1919 until November 1921. Edited by World War I correspondent and freelance writer Karl Hans Strobl and Alfons von Czibulka, ran for just 24 pages and included works by such literary lumanaries as Voltaire, Charles Nodier, Guy de Maupassant, Théophile Gautier, Victor Hugo, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Charles Dickens, Pushkin, Edgar Allan Poe, Washington Irving, Amelia Edwards, Nathaniel Hawthorne, H. G. Wells, Valery Bryusov and Karel Čapek. The covers were ghoulishly brilliant and the illustrations within featured work by Gustave Dore, Tony Johannot, Rolf von Hoerschelmann, Otto Linnekogel, Carl Rabus, Otto Nückel and Max Schenke.

 

Der Orchideengarten

Der Orchideengarten

 

“What strikes me about these black-and-white drawings is how different they are in tone to the pulp magazines which followed shortly after in America and elsewhere. They’re at once far more adult and frequently more original than the Gothic clichés which padded out Weird Tales and lesser titles for many years.”
 John Coulthart on Der Orchideengarten

 

Der Orchideengarten Der Orchideengarten Der Orchideengarten
Der Orchideengarten Der Orchideengarten
Der Orchideengarten Der Orchideengarten Der Orchideengarten Der Orchideengarten

 

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