A. A. Wyn

Who was A. A. Wyn?

Aaron A. Wyn, born Aaron Weinstein, was an American publisher. He edited pulp magazines for Harold Hersey's Magazine Publishers. When Hersey departed the company in the summer of 1929, Wyn, after a brief interlude from Harold S. Goldsmith, took charge of the company. Hersey's swastika logo was dropped to be replaced by an ace symbol. The company took on the brand, Ace Magazines. The company's main pulps were Detective-Dragnet, Western Trails, Secret Agent X, Love Fiction Monthly, and many others. He also published comics under the Ace Comics name.

Wyn branched out into book publishing in 1945. He founded Ace Books, which specialized in genre paperback books, in 1952.

Wyn was famous for paying his authors as little as he could get away with, which prompted David McDaniel to encode a comment on Wyn into one of his The Man from U.N.C.L.E. novelizations, The Monster Wheel Affair. The first letters of each chapter's title in the book's table of contents, when lined up, spell out "A.A. Wyn is a tightwad".