Tag Archives: Pulpfest

PulpFest 2010

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PulpFest 2010 has announced William F. Nolan as its Guest of Honor:

Among his other accomplishments, Mr. Nolan is a leading authority on pulp fictioneers Max Brand and Dashiell Hammett as well as the other Black Mask contributors who flourished under the regime of editor Joseph T. Shaw.

The Nolan announcement linked with a mention of Hammett brought back memories. The first time I ever heard William Nolan speak was at a function in the LA Central Library in 1969 around the time his critical study Dashiell Hammett: A Casebook appeared. He introduced us to some of the sf field’s great anecdotes that morning. For example, it was the first time I heard about the FBI visiting the Astounding offices to find out if Cleve Cartmill’s fiction about an atomic bomb might have come from a leak at the Manhattan Project.  

Nolan is still going strong, often mentioned here as a featured participant in local book signings. He should be an excellent guest for PulpFest.

(Incidentally, if you want to know any more history about the Pulpcon/PulpFest rift, I just recently discovered that Curt Phillips wrote a fine account in Dave Locke’s zine Time and Again #10.)

Does Curt Phillips Collect Australians?

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Australian fan Nick Falkner (from Adelaide) is currently attending a series of Computer Science conferences in the US (in the real world, Nick is aka: Dr. Nick Falkner of the School of Computer Science at the University of Adelaide) and will be making a flying visit to see family and friends in Abingdon, Virginia on Sunday, November 1 while en route to yet another Computer Science conference in North Carolina.

What makes this event fannish is that one of the above-mentioned friends will be American fan Curt Phillips, who has a stack of American SF magazines to send Nick home with. 

Nick will be the *fourth* Australian fan to visit Curt in 2009, following Melbourne fan Clare McDonald’s surprise visit to Pulpfest in June (while on her way to the Worldcon in Montreal), and Damien Warman & Juliette Woods of Adelaide who attended Corflu Zed last March in Seattle where Curt was the “Corflu 50 Fan Fund” delegate. 

Curt reports that he completely approves of this trend and is looking forward to seeing which traveling Australian fan drops by for Christmas. 

[Thanks to Curt Phillips for contributing this post.]

Update 10/31/2009: Corrected name per comment.

Pulpcon 38 Cancelled

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Evidently Pulpcon did not survive to hold number 38, which had been scheduled for August 14-16. Stephen Haffner’s site lists the event as having been cancelled.

File 770 has followed the story of two rival pulp conventions since hearing about the schism in the Pulpcon committee last year. A breakaway group launched a new con, Pulpfest, which took place in Columbus, OH the last weekend in July.

Pulpfest Begins on July 31

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Pulpfest starts today in Columbus, Ohio. The Columbus Dispatch‘s advance article delivers a solid historic perspective about pulp collecting that helps compensate for a pedestrian lead:

For many Americans, pulp refers to the small pieces of fruit found in orange juice.

For the several hundred fans and collectors converging this week in Columbus, though, the word takes on thrilling — and occasionally lurid — dimensions:

It indicates the genre of fiction that introduced characters such as Tarzan and Zorro.

Despite studious attention to the collecting angle, the Dispatch reporter missed the real story:

This is the first edition of the new pulp convention organized by fans who broke away from Pulpcon.

The Parkersburg, WV News and Sentinel scooped the big city paper by capturing that detail in its interview with Pulpfest’s Ed Hulse:

Event spokesman Ed Hulse said PulpFest is a spinoff of PulpCon in Dayton, Ohio, but the Columbus-based convention is as much about drawing in new fans as catering to longtime lovers of pulp.

“It is a hobby that has flown under the radar for many years,” Hulse said. “There were over a thousand pulp magazines published in this country between 1896 and the 1950s. Several fiction genres were born in the pages of pulp magazines.”

Incidentally, Pulpcon 38 still has a web page, but there is no information about a date or location on it. Its publicity site is static and its Registration and Information links are dormant.. Other sources list it happening August 14-16 in Dayton, OH.  

[Thanks to Andrew Porter for the links.]