way to a combination tobacco/magazine store and buy the new Weird Tales issue, sometimes smuggling it home under his coat if the cover was particularly risqué. His parents were not impressed with Hugh Doak Rankin's sexy covers for the magazine, and when the Bloch family moved to Milwaukee in 1928 young Bloch gradually abandoned his interest. But by the time he had entered high school, he returned to reading Weird Tales during convalescence from flu. H. P. Lovecraft, a frequent contributor to Weird Tales, became one of his favorite writers. The first of Lovecraft's stories he had read was "Pickman's Model," in Weird Tales for October 1927. Bloch wrote: "In school I was forced to squirm my way through the works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Lowell and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. In 'Pickman's Model', the ghouls ate all three. Now that, I decided, was poetic justice." As a teenager, Bloch wrote a fan letter to Lovecraft (1933), asking where he could find copies of earlier stories of Lovecraft's that Bloch had missed. Lovecraft lent them to him. Lovecraft also gave Bloch advice on his early fiction-writing efforts, asking whether Bloch had written any weird work and, if so, whether he might see samples of it. Bloch took up Lovecraft's offer in late April 1933, sending him two short items, "The Gallows" and another work whose title is unknown. Lovecraft also suggested Bloch write to other members of the Lovecraft Circle, including August Derleth, R. H. Barlow, Clark Ashton Smith, Donald Wandrei, Frank Belknap Long, Henry S. Whitehead, E. Hoffmann Price, Bernard Austin Dwyer and J. Vernon Shea. Bloch's first completed tales were "Lilies," "The Laughter of a Young Ghoul" and "The Black Lotus". Bloch submitted these to Weird Tales; editor Farnsworth Wright summarily rejected them all. However Bloch successfully placed "Lilies" in the semi-professional magazine Marvel Tales (Winter 1934) and "Black Lotus" in Unusual Stories (1935). Bloch later commented, "I figured I'd better do something different or I'd end up as a florist." Bloch graduated from high school in June 1934. He then wrote a story which promptly (six weeks later) sold to Weird Tales. Bloch's first publication in Weird Tales was a letter criticising the Conan stories of Robert E. Howard. His first professional sales, at the age of 17 (July 1934), to Weird Tales, were the short stories "The Feast in the Abbey" and "The Secret in the