Tired of fanhistoricist bullies kicking sand in your face? Want to impress femmefans at parties? Change your life today and strengthen your mind! Start by lifting a copy of Harry Warner’s All Our Yesterdays, newly reissued by the NESFA Press. Let fandom’s leading historian be your coach and soon your cerebellum will be rippling with revelations of fanac in times of old!

With extra vitality injected by editor Joe Siclari, this powerful classic is harnessed by Steve Stiles’s cover art in a dust jacket designed by Alice Lewis. All Our Yesterdays is the late Harry Warner’s history of SF fandom up to 1950, first published in 1969 by Advent:Publishers but long out of print.

The new NESFA Press version is studded with additional photos that were not in the Advent edition. NESFA Press also boasts the book has a more muscular index. It must be quite fine, George Price’s original index was extravagantly praised by Warner himself. Presumbly, no one dared tamper with Wilson “Bob” Tucker’s original Introduction as long as any Olympian lightning bolts remained in the Bloomington arsenal.

Warner explained in “Most of My Days Before Yesterday” (Pelf 7, April 1969) how dissatisfied he was with the major fan histories that had been created up to then: “They had all emphasized fandom as a power struggle and this seemed wrong to me. Fandom, of all places, is a field where nobody can wield power over more than a fistful of local acolytes, at best.” In particular, Warner saw his history as an antidote to Sam Moskowitz’ epic, The Immortal Storm. He dryly remarked about the rival work: “If read directly after a history of World War II, it does not seem like an anticlimax.” (John Trimble campaigned for Warner’s book to be called “The Immortal Calm.”)

The origins of many kinds of fanac, from fanzines and apas to clubs and costuming, are traced in All Our Yesterdays. Conventions, especially Worldcons, are prominently featured in his chronicle although he didn’t go to them even when they were close to home. He made an exception for Noreascon I, the 1971 Worldcon, where he was fan guest of honor.

Harry Warner, Jr. was born in 1922 and died in 2003. He had been an active science fiction fan since 1936. Through the years he gained fame in the science fiction world variously as a fanzine publisher, correspondent, fan writer, and historian. His fanzine Horizons had been a mainstay of the Fantasy Amateur Press Association since 1939, and his correspondence appeared in the letter columns of seemingly every science fiction fanzine title published since the 1930s. He won the Best Fanwriter Hugo in 1969 and 1972, and A Wealth of Fable garnered him another Hugo in 1993 for Best Non-Fiction Book.