Trails and Romantic Range Tremaine and Desmond Hall founded Street & Smith's slick Mademoiselle in 1935. Hall was the listed editor. In the December 1933 issue of Astounding, Tremaine's third as editor, his editorial "Thought Variant" encouraged contributing authors to seek new ideas for science fiction stories. According to Alva Rogers, "the thought variant policy was largely responsible for the rapid rise of Astounding to top position in the science fiction field." During the fifty issues of the magazine he edited, Tremaine launched the careers of authors L. Sprague de Camp, Eric Frank Russell, and others. He also published stories by his brother Nelson under the pseudonym Warner van Lorne; van Lorne's true identity was a matter of intense speculation in fandom. As editor of Astounding, Tremaine bought such stories as H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness (sold by Julius Schwartz) and The Shadow Out of Time (sold by Donald Wandrei), apparently without reading them. Tremaine permitted both tales to be severely abridged and edited by copyeditors, although Lovecraft complained vociferously only about the former (it was on this occasion that he referred to Tremaine as "that god-damnn'd dung of a hyaena" (Lovecraft to Robert H. Barlow, June 4, 1936 (ms, John Hay Library)). In late 1937, Tremaine hired John W. Campbell, Jr. to replace him as editor of Astounding, while Tremaine was appointed editorial director of Street & Smith, a position he held for a year before departing Street & Smith during a management shake-up. From early 1939 through at least 1941, he ran his own New York book publishing company, the Orlin Tremaine Company. (See separate listing of publications below.) On June 23, 1941, an associate editor of the firm, William M. Gibson, was convicted of extortion. He and Prince Ludovic Pignatelli of Italy had threatened the prince's cousin, Prince Guido Pignatelli, with publishing a book that would challenge Guido's right to his title unless they were paid $50,000. The timing roughly corresponds with the last-known publications of the Orlin Tremaine Co., but it is unknown whether the two events are related. Simultaneous to his publishing ventures, Tremaine produced the science fiction pulp Comet, which ran five issues from December 1940 to July 1941. Also, from late 1939 through early 1940, Tremaine published four stories in pulps as diverse as Thrilling Wonder Stories and South Sea Stories. During World War II, Tremaine edited Magazine Plus, distributed to