Imagination Magazine
Overview
Imagination was an American science fiction digest magazine published from October 1950 to October 1958, totaling 63 issues. Launched by Raymond A. Palmer's Clark Publishing Company of Evanston, Illinois, it was quickly sold to William Hamling's Greenleaf Publishing, and under Hamling's editorship it became a reliable mid-market venue whose declared policy put entertainment first. At a steady price of thirty-five cents, Imagination published early work by writers who became central to modern science fiction.
Founding by Raymond Palmer
Raymond A. Palmer, the former editor of Amazing Stories, launched Imagination in October 1950 through his Clark Publishing Company in Evanston, Illinois. Palmer was simultaneously running Other Worlds, and Imagination was conceived as a companion title. Almost immediately, however, Palmer sold the magazine to William Hamling, another Chicago-area publisher who had worked in the Ziff-Davis orbit. Hamling's Greenleaf Publishing took over the title, and Hamling himself became editor from the third issue, February 1951, remaining in charge until the end.
William Hamling's Editorship
Hamling edited Imagination for nearly its entire run, giving it a consistent identity unusual among small science fiction titles. His policy was openly entertainment-first: stories were bought to be read with pleasure rather than to advance the genre's literary ambitions. Critics of the time sometimes treated this as a limitation, but it made the magazine dependable for readers and for writers, who found in Hamling a prompt and professional market.
Format and Price
Imagination was a digest-sized magazine priced at thirty-five cents throughout its life — a notable stability in a decade of rising costs. Early issues ran to 166 pages; from April 1954 the page count dropped to 134, reflecting the tightening economics of digest publishing. The magazine appeared on a regular schedule for eight years, an achievement for an independent publisher competing against larger houses.
Fiction and Notable Firsts
The magazine's most famous publishing credit is "Final Examination" by Robert Sheckley, printed in May 1952 — Sheckley's first professional sale, and the beginning of one of the most admired careers in science fiction short fiction. Imagination also published work by Philip K. Dick, Robert A. Heinlein and John Wyndham, among many others. Its mixture of established names and beginners made it a genuine training ground: a writer's early appearances in Imagination often preceded sales to the field's leading magazines.
Sister Magazine: Imaginative Tales
In 1954 Hamling added a companion digest, Imaginative Tales, which ran until 1958 alongside Imagination. The pair gave Greenleaf Publishing a stable presence in the science fiction market through the middle of the decade. When the distributor crisis of 1957–58 struck, however, the economics supporting both titles collapsed together.
The American News Company Collapse
Imagination's end was caused less by its own performance than by the failure of the distribution system. The liquidation of the American News Company in 1957 destroyed the newsstand network on which independent digest magazines depended. Like many titles that year, Imagination lost its route to readers. The final issue appeared in October 1958, closing the magazine after 63 issues.
Reputation and Assessment
Historians of the field generally rate Imagination as a solid second-tier magazine with first-tier moments. Its entertainment-first policy kept literary experimentation at arm's length, but its editor's eye for new talent — Sheckley above all — secured its place in the record. Surviving copies are collected for their covers and for early appearances by writers whose later fame far outgrew the magazine that first bought their work.
Legacy
Imagination documents the brief flourishing of the independent American science fiction digest between the pulp era's end and the distribution collapse of the late 1950s. Its story — a Palmer launch, a quick sale, eight steady years under one editor, and an end imposed by forces outside its control — is representative of its generation of magazines.
Imagination's editorial formula rewards a closer look, because it was more deliberate than its modest reputation suggests. Hamling's entertainment-first policy was a considered position in the 1950s field's central argument: whether science fiction magazines should pursue literary respectability or serve readers straightforward adventure and wonder. Where John W. Campbell's Astounding preached ideas and the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction pursued literature, Imagination unapologetically sold enjoyment — and the market test of that position is that an independent publisher in Evanston sustained it, unchanged in price at thirty-five cents, for eight full years while better-financed rivals folded around it. Its eye for beginners was the policy's dividend: the May 1952 appearance of "Final Examination", Robert Sheckley's first professional sale, was not luck but the predictable result of an editor who read new writers carefully. That Philip K. Dick, Robert A. Heinlein and John Wyndham also appeared in a magazine of Imagination's size shows how effectively Hamling punched above his budget.
The magazine's physical record reinforces the picture of disciplined small publishing: 166 pages trimmed to 134 in April 1954 as costs rose, a sister title — Imaginative Tales — added in 1954 when conditions allowed, and a clean end in October 1958 when the American News Company's liquidation removed the distribution on which the whole structure rested. Imagination did not fail; its road to the reader was demolished, a distinction its history makes unusually clear.
The magazine's Evanston base is a footnote with meaning. New York dominated American magazine publishing, but Chicago and its suburbs formed a genuine second capital of science fiction: Ziff-Davis published Amazing Stories and Fantastic Adventures there, Palmer built Clark Publishing in Evanston after leaving Ziff-Davis, and Hamling's Greenleaf operated in the same orbit. Imagination's existence — a Palmer launch sold within months to another Evanston publisher, who ran it for eight years — maps that regional industry in a single title. Its 63 issues closed in October 1958 not with declining quality but with the disappearance of the American News Company's distribution, the event that ended the independent digest as a class. In that sense Imagination's full story is the story of its generation of magazines, told at the scale of one well-edited title.
Hamling's career after Imagination underlines the magazine's place in his publishing life: Greenleaf's two digests were the foundation of his later ventures, and the editorial habits formed at Imagination — fast reading of new writers, respect for the entertainment contract with the reader, disciplined scheduling — carried into everything he published afterward. The magazine he bought as a Palmer cast-off became the title by which his editorship is remembered, and its 63 issues the measure of what an independent science fiction publisher could sustain before 1958 changed the industry's ground rules.
Imagination's story selection, revisited in modern reprints and indexes, shows the entertainment-first policy producing a more interesting magazine than its contemporary notices allowed. Alongside the Sheckley debut and the Dick, Heinlein and Wyndham appearances, its monthly flow of space opera, planetary romance and light fantasy constituted the ordinary reading diet of the 1950s science fiction audience — the diet on which the genre's book market was raised. Historians reconstructing that audience's experience work through Imagination precisely because it was typical at a high standard, rather than exceptional.
Directory Facts
Imagination Magazine was a science fiction digest published in Evanston, Illinois, United States, first by Clark Publishing Company and then by Greenleaf Publishing, from October 1950 to October 1958 (63 issues). Its editor for most of the run was William Hamling. The magazine is defunct.
