Thanks, I Guess

FANZINES: The DIY Revolution (Chronicle, paper, $40) by Teal Triggs is one of three books Steven Heller covers in his New York Times review “Irreverence You Can Almost Touch”.

Heller’s review has drawn fannish attention because it quotes Triggs giving proper credit for the fannish origin of the word “fanzines” in the Times’ hallowed pages:

Fanzines are extremely diverse and intensely personal — some filled with rant, some with reason — and their adherents use the form much like a blog, to communicate and interact with like-minded people. “The term ‘fanzine,’ ” Triggs explains, “is the conflation of ‘fan’ and ‘magazine,’ and was coined by the American sci-fi enthusiast and zine producer Louis Russell Chauvenet in 1940 in his hectographed fanzine Detours . . . when he declared his preference for the term ‘fanzine’ rather than ‘fanmag.’ ”

But gratifying as that may be, Heller otherwise gives 100% of his attention to zines devoted to rock music, comics, fashion and politics – significant to him products of a counter-cultural underground. I feel as if all those decades when fanzines were the torchbearers of sf fandom, and that alone, got shoved aside and wonder how long it will take for this view of fanzine history to imprint itself on the curators of the several university library fanzine collections founded over the past few years?

[Thanks to Moshe Feder and Gary Farber for the link.]