I am reading the November, 1932 issue of Astounding Stories, starting with “The Cavern of the Shining Ones,” by Hal K. Wells. The magazine is on archive.org.

Archive.org has a library of pulps and other popular magazines, going back more than 100 years. At a glance, the most recent pulps seem to date to the 1990s.

Months ago, I chatted with a gentleman at a local community association meeting who makes a hobby out of browsing the pulp archive. He likes dark fantasy magazines from the 1920s and 1930s. He said he occasionally finds a gem from someone who only ever wrote one to three stories, and who is completely forgotten.

“The Cavern of the Shining Ones” isn’t a gem, but it’s not bad. It has a Lovecraft vibe. A party of men, recruited from Los Angeles’s homeless population by a mysterious scientist who wears goggles day and night, is searching for something in the desert. I’m only partway through the story, but I believe they will find the thing, and it will not go well for them.

Here’s the author’s biography, just one paragraph on the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.

He was born in 1899 in Little Hocking, Ohio, and died in 1979 in Torrance, California. He saw active service in World War I and published “The Brass Key” in Weird Tales in 1929. Another title: “Zehru of Xollar” (1932). His work had “a tendency to the lurid.” I’ll just bet it did.

Archive.org offers downloadable PDFs of old magazines. (Other formats too.) I downloaded the PDF, loaded it onto my iPhone and can easily read it there. Even after being on the Internet for more than 30 years, sometimes it strikes me with awe.