From the 18th cen­tu­ry onward, the gen­res of Goth­ic hor­ror and fan­ta­sy have flour­ished, and with them the sen­su­al­ly vis­cer­al images now com­mon­place in film, TV, and com­ic books. These gen­res per­haps reached their aes­thet­ic peak in the 19th cen­tu­ry with writ­ers like Edgar Allan Poe and illus­tra­tors like Gus­tave Dore. But it was in the ear­ly twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry that a more pop­ulist sub­genre tru­ly came into its own: “weird fic­tion,” a term H.P. Love­craft used to describe the pulpy brand of super­nat­ur­al hor­ror cod­i­fied in the pages of Amer­i­can fan­ta­sy and hor­ror mag­a­zine Weird Tales—first pub­lished in 1923. (And still going strong!)

A pre­cur­sor to EC Comics’ many lurid titles, Weird Tales is often con­sid­ered the defin­i­tive ear­ly twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry venue for weird fic­tion and illus­tra­tion.

But we need only look back a few years and to anoth­er con­ti­nent to find an ear­li­er pub­li­ca­tion, serv­ing Ger­man-speak­ing fans—Der Orchideen­garten (“The Gar­den of Orchids”), the very first hor­ror and fan­ta­sy mag­a­zine, which ran 51 issues from Jan­u­ary 1919 to Novem­ber 1921.

The mag­a­zine fea­tured work from its edi­tors Karl Hans Strobl and Alfons von Czibul­ka, from bet­ter-known con­tem­po­raries like H.G. Wells and Karel Capek, and from fore­fa­thers like Dick­ens, Pushkin, Guy de Mau­pas­sant, Poe, Voltaire, Wash­ing­ton Irv­ing, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and oth­ers. “Although two issues of Der Orchideen­garten were devot­ed to detec­tive sto­ries,” writes 50 Watts, “and one to erot­ic sto­ries about cuck­olds, it was a gen­uine fan­ta­sy mag­a­zine.” And it was also a gallery of bizarre and unusu­al art­work.

50 Watts quotes from Franz Rottensteiner’s descrip­tion of the magazine’s art, which ranged “from rep­re­sen­ta­tions of medieval wood­cuts to the work of mas­ters of the macabre such as Gus­tave Dore or Tony Johan­not, to con­tem­po­rary Ger­man artists like Rolf von Hoer­schel­mann, Otto Lenneko­gel, Karl Rit­ter, Hein­rich Kley, or Alfred Kubin.” These artists cre­at­ed the cov­ers and illus­tra­tions you see here, and many more you can see at 50 Watts, the black sun, and John Coulthart’s {feuil­leton}.

“What strikes me about these black-and-white draw­ings,” like the dense, fren­zied pen-and-ink scene above, Coulthart com­ments, “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.” Indeed, though the for­mat may be sim­i­lar to its suc­ces­sors, Der Orchideen­garten’s cov­ers show the influ­ence of Sur­re­al­ism, “some are almost Expres­sion­ist in style,” and many of the illus­tra­tions show “a dis­tinct Goya influ­ence.”

Pop­u­lar fan­ta­sy and hor­ror illus­tra­tion has often leaned more toward the soft-porn of sev­en­ties air­brushed vans, pulp-nov­el cov­ers, or the gris­ly kitsch of the comics. Rot­ten­stein­er writes in his 1978 Fan­ta­sy Book that this “large-for­mat mag­a­zine… must sure­ly rank as one of the most beau­ti­ful fan­ta­sy mag­a­zines ever pub­lished.” It’s hard to argue with that assess­ment. View, read (in Ger­man), and down­load orig­i­nal scans of the magazine’s first sev­er­al issues over on this Prince­ton site.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2016.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Georges Méliès A Trip to the Moon Became the First Sci-Fi Film & Changed Cin­e­ma For­ev­er (1902)

Read Mar­garet Cavendish’s The Blaz­ing World: The First Sci-Fi Nov­el Writ­ten By a Woman (1666)

The First Work of Sci­ence Fic­tion: Read Lucian’s 2nd-Cen­tu­ry Space Trav­el­ogue A True Sto­ry

Free: 356 Issues of Galaxy, the Ground­break­ing 1950s Sci­ence Fic­tion Mag­a­zine

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness