Imagination (magazine) - Bibliographic Details

Bibliographic Details

Imagination was digest size (7.5 × 5.5 inches or 19.1 × 14.0 cm) for its first 17 issues, and then shrank slightly to a short digest size (7.25 × 5.5 inches or 18.4 × 14.0 cm) for the rest of its run, a further 46 issues. The volume number rose by one at the start of each calendar year, regardless of the number of issues. Volume 1, 1950, contained only two issues; subsequent volumes contained five to twelve issues, depending on frequency of publication. The overall issue number was printed on the spine (an unusual practice) along with the volume number. The first issue had a publication date of October 1950, and the schedule was bimonthly through the September 1952 issue except that June 1951 was followed by September 1951. The next four issues were dated October 1952, December 1952, January 1953 and February 1953, and then a monthly run began with April 1953 that lasted without a break until the July 1955 issue. The next issue was October 1955, which inaugurated another bimonthly period that ran with perfect regularity until the last issue, October 1958. The price remained at 35 cents throughout.

The title of the magazine was initially "Imagination: Stories of Science and Fantasy"; it changed with the October 1955 issue to "Imagination: Science Fiction", though this change was only on the cover and spine and was never reflected on the masthead.

The first 28 issues were 166 pages long. The page count dropped to 134 with the April 1954 issue and stayed at that length for the remainder of the run. The cover layout initially strongly resembled that of Other Worlds but was changed with the fifth issue, June 1951, to have a white background banner for the title. This format was retained for the rest of the magazine's life, with occasional slight variations such as using a different color for the banner background. The spine also changed from a colored spine with pale lettering, which was similar to the spine style used by Other Worlds, to a white spine with red or blue lettering.

The publisher was Clark Publishing Company for the first two issues. The editor for those issues was Raymond Palmer, but as he was hospitalized much of the work was done by Bea Mahaffey. As a result these two issues are sometimes indexed with Mahaffey as editor. With the third issue, Greenleaf Publishing Company became the publisher and William Hamling took over as editor, a position he retained throughout the magazine's life.