Preface to the Web Edition

The purpose of this re-publication is, first, to get Fancyclopedia II
on line as a part of fannish history; and, second, to make it available as a
template for the further development and completion of the projected
Fancyclopedia III.

My plan is to put it up here, on my page on SFF.Net, and invite
corrections (and search for missing items -- see the "Needs" button below) for
several months, then switch it to the permanent location that's been offered
on the Timebinders site.

In a linked but separate operation (ghod, I love it when I get a chance to
babble in bureaucratese!) I hope to collect new topics for Fancyclopedia
III.  That is a project which has been worked on by LASFS and others; I'm
not up to date on how much progress has been made, but there is clearly much
still to do.

Speer's Fancyclopedia was a tour de force by an exceptional
scholar at almost the last moment when the entirety of fandom could be
apprehended by a single individual.  By the time I took on Fancyclopedia
II, that was no longer possible; fandom never did have the scholarly
mechanism through which history could be researched by a few individuals, nor
were comprehensive contacts possible any longer.  Trying only taught me how
imperfect were our historical resources.

(And looking at the result a generation later makes me uncomfortably aware of
the changes that took place since 1959.  I can laugh at my comment to our remote 
posterity, "For our readers in the year 2000..."  But who'd have thought that describing
Kabu's females as "fubsy" [plump, pleasant and slightly pedomorphic] would
have become offensive for people who saw the word as related to "fubba-wubba"
[fat, sloppy and cranky]?  Let alone the change in Marion Z. Bradley's views
since she wrote the comment under "Fannettes" as a young woman of 22 living in
isolation in the Texas countryside.)  

Fancyclopedia III may prove an impossible project, coming as it does
when there is simply too much fandom to get a grip on.  The Star Trek buffs
and the Gamers would have been hard enough to include, but with Filkers,
Goths, the SCA, and Anime/Manga fans now coming under our umbrella -- not to
mention a.s.b. -- and whole separate universes like that of the Hackers
existing in parallel to ours (there are exciting glimpses of all these in
Roberta Rogow's Futurespeak and in The Hacker's Dictionary) I'm
glad I am only one of the helping hands on Cy3.  It is not
impossible that a committee of editors could succeed, and even a good failure
would be something worth having.

Even in putting together Cy2 I had to do as extensive a
polling as I could among all the current and past fans I could reach.  (An
approach that, unhappily, turned Redd Boggs off the project.)  What began as a
card file written on discarded Japanese library filing cards after three or
four years of collection had expanded to a couple of yard-long filing cases of
cards, many with references to separate sheets, folders, or booklets.  Nearly
a year of mechanical production followed, involving discovering a new method
of binding, finding out that mimeo paper in bulk was handled as railway
freight, and picking up graphics skills in a manner more logically than
aesthetically pleasing.  (I still hadn't learned to do illos with a stylus
properly and used tipped-in Gestefax electronic cuts, at that time a novelty.) 
Eventually Cy2 went on sale at the Worldcon in Pittsburgh,
though only just -- on the way my car's motor burned out and Bob Pavlat had to
come and rescue our party.  I remember J&dYoung and I sitting in my hotel room
putting the finished booklet together with Acco fasteners.  Mirabile
dictu, people did buy this Special Convention Fanzine; enough of
them, anyway, to pay for our hotel bill and most of the gas.

Then Noreen Shaw kicked up a fuss and got Cy2 thrown off the
Hugo ballot the year it was eligible, on the grounds that I was on the Con
committee at the time.  (No, I never did forgive her; would you have?)  The
printing (450 copies, wow!) was sold out over the next two years and I thought
that was that, especially since I was going for my graduate degree and was
pretty fafiated for a while.  It was pleasant to hear, about fifteen years
later, that there was some interest in reprinting Cy2 and in
proceeding to Cy3, but the Cy3 project got
passed from one editor to another and seems to be still in the collection
phase.  I've got to find out for sure...

After a number of moves that needn't be detailed, I decided to put
Cy2 on the Web, for the reasons I've explained.  (What?  Oh,
I did so.  Go back and read the first paragraph.)

This couldn't have been achieved in any reasonable time frame -- maybe not at
all -- except for the help (and occasional prodding) of my dear Lady, Tamar
Lindsay, who not only saw to the conversion of the text into WordPerfect but
even worked out ways to reproduce, in that electronic form, most of the odd
typographic items I'd put in the original -- stuff like semi-cancelling and
quasi-quotemarks and even the goofy brackets I did by typing a hyphen on top
of a slant bar.  (Never thinking that I might be offending Walt Willis...)  I
am more than a little annoyed that most of these latter ingenuities were
unintelligible to HTML.  "HyperText" indeed.  MumblemumbleStupid mundane
electronicsgrrsnortpfui.

But there are a couple of other serious lacunae in the present electronic
version: for one thing, few of the illos in the original Tamar and I worked
from are scannable, and I have no copy of the "Additions and Corrections"
pamphlet that I did about a year after Fancyclopedia II came out.  Put
it down to several years overseas, an unexpected move after the death of my
parents, and the problems of shoehorning two obligate collectors' household
goods into a single home not so large as a dirigible hangar...anyway, these
items are lacking and I would be forever grateful to anyone who could provide
xeroxes.  (Reproducible ones, in the case of the illos.)  But more about that
on the "Needs" button.

From here I suggest you go to the introductory pages or start in reading the
text, which is in files named from the International Phonetic Alphabet.  Drop
back now and then -- I will update at intervals, making corrections and adding
stuff I haven't put in yet, such as the illos and the Additions and
Corrections.  I would be happy to hear from you if you have comments,
corrections or expansions on Cy2, or suggestions for things
that ought to go in Cy3.  My snail-mail address is Box 589,
Bladensburg, Md. 20710 USA, and my e-mail is dickeney@pop.erols.com.  

Right now I'm still working for my uncle, but in 2000 I'll be retiring.  I
swore that I'd become active in fandom again once that World Revolution thing
blew over, and now I guess I'll have to think of some project to take on when
I can turn my full attention to serious matters. 

                              -- Dick Eney

Now, let's see if I can manage this link and Button business...

Updated January 8, 1999. If you have a comment or question about these Web pages please send a note to the Fanac Webmaster. Thank you.