Oriental Stories


Oriental Stories, later retitled The Magic Carpet Magazine, was an American pulp magazine of 1930-34, an offshoot of the famous Weird Tales.
Like its parent, it was published by J.C. Henneberger's Popular Fiction Publishing and edited by Farnsworth Wright. As its titles indicate, the magazine specialized in adventure and fantasy stories with Oriental settings and elements. Its stories were largely written by the same distinctive group of authors that filled the pages of Weird Tales, including Robert E. Howard, Otis Adelbert Kline, E. Hoffmann Price, Clark Ashton Smith, and Frank Owen, among others. Several of the covers for Oriental Stories were drawn by artists J. Allen St. John and Margaret Brundage.
The magazine struggled financially for the entirety of its existence ; it was published first bi-monthly, then quarterly, during the grimmest years of the Great Depression. Volume 1 of Oriental Stories consisted of 6 issues that appeared on newsstands from October 1930 through Autumn 1931; Volume 2 comprised only 3 issues in the first half of 1932. After a six-month hiatus, the first of four quarterly issues of Volume 3 appeared in January 1933, but with the new title The Magic Carpet.
One notable contributor to The Magic Carpet was popular pulp author H. Bedford-Jones. Still unable to muster sufficient circulation, Volume 4 started and ended with the single issue No. 1 in January 1934. The Magic Carpet was then defunct.