Today’s post is from Karen Hellekson’s, “Fandom, Fanzine, and Archiving Science Fiction Fannish History.” Hellekson, in addition to being an aca-fan, co-editor of Fan Fiction and Fan Cultures in the Age of the Internet and The Fan Fiction Studies Reader, and one of the founding editors of TWC/Transformative Works and Cultures, is also an expert on science fiction literature and fandom in particular. In this article, Hellekson focuses “on the historical moment when media fandom branched off sf fandom, which also heralded a turn from fanzines as newsy accounts of fan clubs to fan-created fiction set in various properties’ story worlds.” She talks about the history of fanzines through their technologies (letterpress printing and carbon paper, hectographs, Mimeograph machine and spirit duplicators, photocopying) and also gives a cultural history of science fiction fanzines.
There’s much to love in this essay - including some great images of zines and mimeograph machines and other things that make me sentimental and nostalgic for the analog world that was - but maybe my favorite thing is her description of zinemaking being demonstrated for an appreciative audience. IYKYK.
I have looked at a lot of fanzines; they have been an interest of mine since about 1982, when I was in high school and I joined a Doctor Who fan club that put one out. Further, as someone employed in the printing industry, I remain interested in how this world and its requirements overlap with the world of printing hard-copy fanzines. I do have experience in creating physical artifacts like fanzines: I was always on the newsletter committee at church camp when I was a girl, and I preferred typing mimeo stencils to interviewing fellow campgoers. I worked as a secretary in college and used carbon paper and Selectric typewriters. I was a secretary in grad school and used the Xerox photocopier with a sheet of yellow plastic so the machine could copy the professors’ light purple mimeographed handouts; the grad students used dot-matrix printers and had to rip the pages apart. Now we all print things out on laser printers, or maybe we don’t need a hard copy at all. But I am familiar with the smell of the solvent used to mask errors on a mimeograph stencil. I know about the erasers used when typing a fair copy; there’s even a sculpture of one in Washington, DC (Oldenburg & van Bruggen, 1999). I know what a pain it is to center or right-justify text on a manual keyboard. I know what the cc: means at the bottom of the letter: it’s the literal carbon copy I’m making when I type.
It turns out that all of these things are important when reading old fanzines, because their authors are office-supply geeks and secretary wannabes who make a lot of references to the joys and terrors of putting out a regular zine. They write of the pain of having to right-justify a newsletter, which only goes to show how much they care for their readers—although the extra work made the issue late. They lament the hideousness of having to retype a stencil after making an error at the end—no wonder it was late! They hurl accusations at certain people who owed articles but didn’t write them, so the editor had to write everything himself at the last minute—no wonder it was late! They report on the hassle of having to draw everything the wrong way round so it would appear correctly when printed—it made them just a little late. They preen because they hand-colored a photo and pasted it into every issue—it was worth the wait!
I am one of a subset of readers for fanzines, the existence of which I hadn’t considered: the office-supply geeks, the once-upon-a-secretaries who had to hand- crank the mimeo machine, the grad student wielding a yellow plastic sheet at the photocopier while wondering why the professors didn’t update their mimeo’d handouts, the folks who remember that one time they created a newsletter with some friends but never got past issue 2, because nobody could get it together enough to do issue 3. To people like me, for whom this is nostalgia—those of us who have done all these things and know exactly what these fan writers are talking about—the fanzine editors’ focus on physically creating a timely newsletter is hilarious. And it’s not just people of a certain age who find this riveting.
At the 2014 Worldcon in London, I attended a demonstration of fanzine making via spirit duplication. Instead of watching the presenters, I watched the audience watching the presenters. I was delighted to see that they were fascinated. For me, the sharp smell of the solvent was familiar; so was the chug-chug-chug of the machine as it pooped out wet pages of light purple typewritten text. I couldn’t believe I had forgotten these smells and these sounds. But to the newbies, it was, well, new. Imagine! Smelling that! Imagine smelling that every day as you wrote a fanzine in 1953! It was thrilling, seeing that on their faces. And it was thrilling, feeling that: 1953! I was 40 years after that! They too smelled that smell! In 1953!
