The Black Cat Project

While searching for short stories for Our Past in the Uncanny Valley, I became familiar with HathiTrust‘s library of scanned books and periodicals. I’ve also been wanting to do a project where I read serial literature from a previous era in the time-frame it was published. This isn’t quite that, but I’d like to imagine that it’s one hundred and twenty three years ago and I just picked up  (for 5¢) the recent issue of The Black Cat at my local newsstand.

Why The Black Cat? During my other research, it struck me as being maybe more likely to contain genre stories and maybe more likely to include female authors. These are just feelings of mine. I haven’t (yet) taken a good survey of The Black Cat‘s contents or how they compare to other magazines of the era.

My plan is to read an issue each month in October, November, and December and report back. If it goes well, I’ll continue this project.

• The Black Cat, No. 1, October 1895
• The Black Cat, No. 2, November 1895
• The Black Cat, No. 3, December 1895
• The Black Cat, No. 4, January 1896
• The Black Cat, No. 5, February 1896
• The Black Cat, No. 6, March 1896
• The Black Cat, No. 7, April 1896
• The Black Cat, No. 8, May 1896
• The Black Cat, No. 9, June 1896
• The Black Cat, No. 10, July 1896
• The Black Cat, No. 11, August 1896
• The Black Cat, No. 12, September 1896
• Happy Halloween from The Black Cat, Vol. 1
• Happy Halloween from The Black Cat, Vol. 2
• The Black Cat, No. 14, November 1896