Speaking as a fandom historian who’s finding it stupidly difficult to collect older zines in SETS so I can document the conversations had in the letters to the editor:
Heaven forbid any of you should pass on at an untimely age, but I can’t tell you what a blessing I’d consider it to receive someone’s hand-bound fanfiction as a museum exhibit with a little letter in the front explaining why they picked that story to bind and how they did it. THAT’S HISTORY. THAT’S MAKING HISTORY. That letter would be called “provenance” and it explains where the item came from and how it came to be, and may provide things like a date or place of origin. I’m literally reading a novel-length fanfiction right now in a fandom I have zero interest in because it’s from 1978, I found the author–still alive–online, and I want to talk to her about her fanfiction before it’s too late. You can have that conversation now. Even if you’re like “I’m 17, who cares about my Dream SMP fanfiction?” I assure you, years from now, having a bound copy of your Dream SMP fanfiction will be something to write academic papers about. On the levels of transformative work (since Dream is, himself, making a transformative work of Minecraft), on the fact that this was a digital fandom from which a tangible work was created, on the fact that you took the time to learn amateur bookbinding to make it happen, all of that will be as historically valuable 30 years from now as teenage diaries from the moon landing are today. All of it! Anything you write in there? Thoughts on what you read, on the bookbinding process, on where you found the story? That shit is so valuable it makes gold look cheap.
If you’re in an all-digital fandom, the fact that you have this item tangibly makes you a keeper of record. In other words: if the entire internet went down forever tomorrow, we would still have proof the property existed and some evidence of how people interacted with it, thanks to you. I can’t overstate how important that is, but I can give you an example: do you know we don’t actually know what all the items were in a traditional Victorian condiment set? Today we’ve got salt, pepper, ketchup, sugar, and occasionally mustard, but we have no idea what all of those items were 130 years ago. Nobody ever fucking wrote it down. It was just assumed that you knew what went into A Proper Table Service, and as times and tastes changed, whoops, there goes that knowledge. Are you bookbinding the next Shakespeare? Probably not, but let’s get real, back in 1598 even Shakespeare wasn’t Shakespeare, he was just some guy who wrote pretty good plays–but today we consider his work a wealth of cultural knowledge.
So yes! Keep this stuff! Write down the provenance! Consider also looking into generalized historians like me (there aren’t many of us out there, but the number is growing as academia realizes how much transformative fandom really has its own culture and history), and looking into specific places you want your fannish works to go. There are academic libraries out there absolutely overflowing with Kirk/Spock zines they can’t interpret (because they have nobody on staff who studies fandom history), don’t know what to do with, and now have to consider throwing away because what the hell do they want with a copy of Spockanalia? (ME. SEND IT TO ME.) BUT, there are also academics who’d love to get their hands on this stuff, if only people knew they existed. Do a little research, make fandom historians happy, and rest easy knowing your work will be treated with care and dignity when you’re gone.
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