When The Black Flame was first published in 1939, Stanley G. Weinbaum had already been dead for three years. By that time, over 18,000 words had been excised or edited from the original manuscript. The intact manuscript, held by Sam Moskowitz, was auctioned off to Forrest J Ackerman at the First World Science Fiction Convention in 1939. It was subsequently stolen from his collection and never recovered. The publication of this edition was made possible by the discovery of a carbon copy of the manuscript in a trunk of Weinbaum's papers found in the basement of his grandson's house in Denver, Colorado.