Fantasy Book was a semi-professional American science fiction magazine that published eight issues between 1947 and 1951. The editor was William Crawford, and the publisher was Crawford's Fantasy Publishing Company, Inc. Crawford had problems distributing the magazine, and his budget limited the quality of the paper he could afford and the artwork he was able to buy, but he attracted submissions from some well-known writers, including Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, A. E. van Vogt, Robert Bloch, and L. Ron Hubbard. The best-known story to appear in the magazine was Cordwainer Smith's first sale, "Scanners Live in Vain", which was later included in the first Science Fiction Hall of Fame anthology, and is now regarded as one of Smith's finest works. Jack Gaughan, later an award-winning science fiction artist, made his first professional sale to Fantasy Book, for the cover illustrating Smith's story. Publication history The first science fiction (SF) magazine, Amazing Stories, appeared in 1926, and by the mid-1930s SF pulp magazines were a well-established genre. In 1933, William Crawford, a Pennsylvania science fiction fan, started Unusual Stories, a semi-professional SF magazine, and he followed this with Marvel Tales in 1934. Neither of the magazines lasted long or achieved wide distribution, though he obtained stories from Clifford Simak, P. Schuyler Miller, and John Wyndham, all of whom were established writers. After World War II, Crawford, by now living in Los Angeles, founded Fantasy Publishing Company, Inc., and in 1947 he launched Fantasy Book in bedsheet format. The editor was listed as "Garret Ford"; this was a pseudonym for Crawford and his wife, Margaret. Some additional editorial work was done by Forrest Ackerman. By the time the first issue was printed in mid-1947, Crawford's distributor had gone out of business, leaving him with 1,000 copies on hand. He attempted to sell the issue through subscription and placed some for sale via specialist dealers. Crawford did not always have access to high-quality paper, and he decided to produce two versions of the second issue: one on book-quality paper, priced at 35 cents, and another on lower-quality paper, priced at 25 cents, intended for newsstand distribution, each featuring different cover artwork. The third and fourth issues were also produced in two versions with different covers, and the same price difference. With the third issue, Crawford reduced the size to digest, announcing, "The change in size may be inconvenient to some collectors—but it has