rights and was spending less time on his editorial duties. According to Lasser, Gernsback told him "if you like working with the unemployed so much, I suggest you go and join them". It is likely that cost-cutting was also a consideration, as Lasser was paid $65 per week, a substantial salary in those days. Soon after Lasser was let go, Gernsback received a fanzine, The Fantasy Fan, from a reader, Charles Hornig. Gernsback called Hornig to his office to interview him for the position of editor; Hornig turned out to be only 17, but Gernsback asked him to proofread a manuscript and decided that the results were satisfactory. Hornig was hired at an initial salary of $20 per week. That same year, Gernsback dissolved Stellar Publications and created Continental Publications as the new publisher for Wonder Stories. The schedule stuttered for the first time, missing the July and September 1933 issues; the recent bankruptcy of the company's distributor, Eastern Distributing Corporation, may have been partly responsible for this disruption. The first issue with Continental on the masthead, and the first listing Hornig as editor, was November 1933. Wonder Stories had a circulation of about 25,000 in 1934, comparable to that of Amazing Stories, which had declined from an early peak of about 100,000. Gernsback considered issuing a reprint magazine in 1934, Wonder Stories Reprint Annual, but it never appeared. That year he experimented with other fiction magazines—Pirate Stories and High Seas Adventures—but neither was successful. Wonder Stories was also failing, and in November 1935 it started publishing bimonthly instead of monthly. Gernsback had a reputation for paying slowly and was therefore unpopular with many authors; by 1936 he was even failing to pay Laurence Manning, one of his most reliable authors. Staff were sometimes asked to delay cashing their paychecks for weeks at a time. Gernsback felt the blame lay with dealers who were returning magazine covers as unsold copies, and then selling the stripped copies at a reduced rate. To bypass the dealers, he made a plea in the March 1936 issue to his readers, asking them to subscribe, and proposing to distribute Wonder Stories solely by subscription. There was little response, and Gernsback decided to sell. He made a deal with Ned Pines of Beacon Magazines and on 21 February 1936 Wonder Stories was sold. Thrilling Wonder Stories Pines' magazines included several with "Thrilling" in the title, such