Carl Richard Jacobi

Carl Richard Jacobi (10 July 1908 – 25 August 1997) was an American journalist and writer.

He wrote short stories in the horror and fantasy genres for the pulp magazine market, appearing in such pulps of the bizarre and uncanny as Thrilling, Ghost Stories, Startling Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories and Strange Stories.

He also wrote stories crime and adventure which appeared in such pulps as Thrilling Adventures, Complete Stories, Top-Notch, Short Stories, The Skipper, Doc Savage and Dime Adventures Magazine.

Jacobi also produced some science fiction, mainly space opera, published in such magazines as Planet Stories.

Jacobi was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1908 and lived there throughout his life.

He was a lifelong bachelor.

He was a voracious reader at an early age, reading Jules Verne, Edgar Allan Poe, H.G. Wells as well as the Frank Merriwell and Tom Swift boys' adventure yarns.

Jacobi was always a writer; at his junior high school he earned good pocket-money concocting his own 'dime novels' (short story booklets) and selling them to fellow students as 10 cents-a-piece.

He was one of the last surviving pulp-fictioneers to have contributed to the legendary American horror magazine Weird Tales during its "glory days" (the 1920s and 1930s).

His stories have been translated into French, Swedish, Danish and Dutch.

Jacobi attended the University of Minnesota from 1927 to 1930, majoring in English Literature, where he began his writing career in campus magazines and was an undergraduate classmate of Donald Wandrei.

Beginning in 1928, Jacobi corresponded with adventure-pulp veteran Arthur O. Friel.

"In the depression years of the early 1930s, the pulp-writer needed as formidable a creative armoury as possible, along with a certain amount of luck, and cunning, to crack even the lowest paying markets. Jacobi had a useful knack for dreaming up memorable milieu against which to set his tales, and bizarre situations that stayed in the mind long after the magazine the story itself was in had been finished and tossed away. He may have been the only writer ever to have a story firmly rejected by the redoubtable Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright, only to have Wright, weeks later, begging for the story back, because an incident in it had stuck in his mind. This was 'Revelations in Black', a chilling, and much-reprinted, vampire tale set in an old stone farmhouse outside of Minneapolis Jacobi had driven past one night (the house's eerie statue-lined garden, as seen by brilliant moonlight, had caught his eye and his imagination."

Jacobi wrote scores of tales for all the best-known magazines of fantasy and science fiction and was represented in numerous anthologies of imaginative fiction published in the United States, England and New Zealand.

His stories were translated into French, Swedish, Danish and Dutch.

Many of his tales were published in anthologies edited by Derleth, and Arkham House published his first three short story collections.

Stories also appeared in such magazines as Short Stories, Railroad Magazine, The Toronto Star, Wonder Stories, MacLean's magazine, Ghost Stories, Strange Stories, Thrilling Mystery, Startling Stories, Complete Stories, Top-Notch and others.

Jacobi joined the editorial staff of The Minnesota Quarterly, and after graduation in 1931, he became a news reporter, reviewer and sub-editor for the Minneapolis Star, as well as a frequent reviewer of books and plays.

He also served on the staff of the Minnesota Ski-U-Mah, a campus humor magazine (described on the jackets of Jacobi's books as 'a scholastic publication').

After a while regular hours palled, and he left the Star, renting an office in uptown Minneapolis in which were typewriter, paper, a few reference books, and a list of editorial addresses in New York.

Jacobi met August Derleth in January 1931 when Derleth was visiting Minneapolis to see Donald Wandrei.

Jacobi had read Derleth's stories in Weird Tales and his Solar Pons stories in Dragnet and asked to be introduced; they met together, and with Donald Wandrei, for a literary roundtable at Minneapolis' Rainbow Cafe.

Though Derleth and Jacobi corresponded for 40 years thereafter, Jacobi saw him but a few times in St Paul and never visited Derleth's home of Sauk City, Wisconsin.

Over the following summer, when Derleth worked briefly as an editor for Fawcett Publications, outside Minneapolis, the three men frequently got together for brainstorming sessions.

Jacobi owned his own private retreat, a cabin at Minnewashta in the Carver country outlands of Minneapolis.

His intimate familiarity with the terrain and environment there provided the setting for many of his most distinguished stories.

Both stories were later sold to Amazing Stories (Winter 1932) and Weird Tales respectively and marked his debut in professional magazines.

"Mive" (Weird Tales, 1932) brought him payment of 25 dollars.

"Mive" was praised by H. P. Lovecraft in his letter to Jacobi of 27 February 1932: "Mive please me immensely, and I told Wright that I was glad to see at least one story whose weirdness of incident was made convincing by adequate emotional preparation and suitably developed atmosphere."

Lovecraft commended Jacobi's work to Derleth and thereby helped set up the long-term relationship Arkham House would have with Jacobi.

Jacobi's early story "The Monument" (1932) was submitted only once—to Farnsworth Wright of Weird Tales.

From 1932 until Jacobi's death in 1997, pulp writer Hugh B. Cave corresponded with Jacobi.

He wrote of this period on Thrilling Wonder Stories (June 1939) that "I tried to divide my time between rhetoric courses and the geology lab. As an underclassman I was somewhat undecided whether future life would find me studying rocks and fossils or simply pounding a typewriter. The typewriter won."

Jacobi's first stories were published while he was at the University.

Long before graduation he made his first professional sale, a short detective tale, "Rumbling Cannon", to Secret Service Stories. This ought to have paid around fifty dollars but Jacobi received nothing since the pulp folded soon after the story was published.

The last of the stories he published while at university, "Moss Island", was a graduate's contribution to The Quest of Central High School, and "Mive" (which won a college-wide contest judged by Margaret Culkin Banning), published in the University of Minnesota's The Minnesota Quarterly.

It was not submitted subsequently but was discovered in a filing cabinet when R. Dixon Smith was researching his biography Lost in the Rentharpian Hills: Spanning the Decades with Carl Jacobi (1985) and finally saw print when included by Smith in Smoke of the Snake (1994).

Scores of their letters are quoted in Cave's memoir Magazines I Remember (Chicago: Tattered Pages Press, 1994), though many of Jacobi's early letters to Cave were lost in a fire in the early 1970s, along with copies of all Cave's early stories.

Jacobi and Cave often criticised and improved each other's stories.

Jack Adrian writes: