Imagination (magazine)

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Hannes Bok cover for the first Imagination

Imagination was a science fiction and fantasy magazine published by William Hamling from October 1950 to October 1958. It had a 1954-58 spin-off, Imaginative Tales, which changed its title to Space Travel in 1958.

Since the first two issues of Imagination were published while Hamling was still a Ziff-Davis employee, Ray Palmer served as a front, and those two issues name Palmer's company, Clark Publishing, as the publisher. No editor is listed, suggesting that they were edited by Palmer. Hamling's Greenleaf Publishing was given as the publisher from 1951 to 1958.

Writers for Imagination included Charles Beaumont, Jerome Bixby, Daniel F. Galouye, Randall Garrett, Richard Matheson, Frederik Pohl, Richard S. Shaver, Robert Silverberg, Dwight V. Swain and Robert Moore Williams.

Robert Bloch contributed a regular fanzine review column, "Pandora's Box," as recalled in 2002 by Robert Lichtman:

My first appearance was in 1942, but due to mundane considerations I didn't discover fandom until 1958, when I ran across Robert Bloch's fanzine review column in an odd issue of William Hamling's Imagination, a now long-vanished prozine. I'd seen fanzine review columns before that, in yellowing and crumbling issues of Amazing from the 1940s on frequent visits to large used book stores in Hollywood (Larsen’s on Sunset near Western, if you remember it). Rog Phillips' "Clubhouse" columns showed me an interesting world of fanzines and sf clubs spread around the country and, apparently, the world; but somehow it didn't occur to me that such a phenomenon might still exist until Bloch's column proved otherwise. I promptly taped some quarters to 3x5 cards, rendering them "sticky," and soon received my Very First Fanzines (Oopsla, Grue and A Bas being the first three). Fantisted by these, I sent away for more and soon was hooked on fandom, most especially "fannish" fandom, a vice which has persisted, with interruptions, to this day. [1]