Fanwriting Before the Internet

The other day I wrote how happy I was to find a collection of John Bangsund’s fanwriting, and moaned over the superb fan writers who thrived in the age of the mimeograph that have none of their articles online.

I’ve realized since then I oversold the tragic fate of these great fans of the past. They didn’t write blogs, and for the most part their material is unavailable in searchable HTML form, so their work has a low profile. However, a lot of fanzines have been scanned in and posted online. All that needs to be done is to give people a reason to want to read them. The PDF versions may lack the scent and feel of disintegrating Twiltone paper, but is that a bad thing?

Quite a few of Wilson “Bob” Tucker’s fanzines can be accessed. For example, 46 of the 67 paper issues of Le Zombie, and the five issues of e-Zombie are at the Midamericon site. And there are even more on FANAC.org.

The FANAC.org Classic Fanzines site has many zines by top fanwriters of the past. The Walt Willis, Chuck Harris, et al, issues of the immortal Hyphen are there, as well as Lee Hoffman’s Quandry, and Terry Carr and Ron Ellik’s BNF of IZ.

Also, an entire area within the site is devoted to The Enchanted Duplicator by Walt Willis and Bob Shaw. The introductory page includes Willis’ revelation that the portions specifically written by Bob Shaw are most of Chapters 5 and 6, part of Chapter 7, and the first paragraph of Chapter 17.

Update 8/1/2008: Removed Bangsund ASFR link, which only leads to a list of issues. 

2 thoughts on “Fanwriting Before the Internet

  1. Mike: Unless I’m being dense, that site only has an issue list for ASFR with publication dates and page counts. There aren’t any copies of the actual fanzines. — Mark

  2. Nope, my fault. I should have clicked all the links I copied. I’ll remove that one from the article.

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