From Harry Warner Jr -
It Goes On The Shelf was a pleasure to read, light
enough in weight for my ancient muscles to hold and few enough
in pages to match my senile attention span. Besides, it's a good
sample of the delights which I hope to find in SFPA if I survive
long enough to reach the top of the waiting list and then dive
into the membership roster from that eminence. (Hang in there
Harry, I see you are 9th on the list in the current
mailing!)
The Machen article hit home. I must be fandom's champion worrier, and I might even rank high in the nation's ranks of mundane worriers. A long time ago, an oldtime fan named Paul Spencer thought I'd reached the ultimate in worrying achievements when I confided to him how worried I was: I felt awful, I took my temperature and found it normal, and I feared this meant my body had lost the ability to create the fever needed to fight a serious infection of some kind. However, I do believe I've topped that worrying record the past few Christmas seasons. One of my favorite songs contains a line which in effect says the singer is wishing a Merry Christmas to all kids from the age of one to ninety-two. I have it on several records, sung by different artists, and I always play those records before Christmas. So now I've started to worry: suppose I imitate my grandmother and live until be almost 100 years old? When I have my 93rd birthday, I'll play those records and I'll mourn the fact that those singers no longer include me in their Christmas wishes. (You'll probably also have outlived some of those singers!)
Maybe Bob Bloch is the last unreconstructed opponent of zip codes, if he uses the old postal zone system on his return address. I'm not sure if you were in fandom when zip codes were introduced and a lot of fans swore eternal enmity to them, considering zip codes useless red tape and regimentation. (Zip codes seem to have appeared in fandom just about the time I did - but don't blame them on me! My first con was the l962 Philcon, and the first OED reference is the NYTimes in 1963 saying they would be just for business mail at first.)
Hold Your Tongue must be somewhat outdated by the Supreme Court decision that makes it possible to write or say almost anything nasty about public figures with comparatively little risk of getting charged with slander or libel. Sometimes I wonder if anyone in the science fiction world is well enough known to the general public to suffer loss of the law's protection against most types of slander and libel. Probably not; I believe the Supreme Court decision affected mostly politicians and related races. (Oh, surely Harlan Ellison and Stephen King...)
Thanks for the IGOTS and naturally I hope you have very pleasant holidays and an equally nice new year.
From Dave Hall -
Well I gots nuthin to report, cept to say I hope you have a
Merry Christmas also I gots your fanzine. ("sic", as they say -
do you suppose he actually talks that way? We have corresponded,
for years, but have never met.)
I like the art work as you could probly guess. I don't know if you realized this but those are dinosaurs. Obviously Sheryl Birkhead knows her dinosaurs, too. I thought when I first saw the cover that someone might have fantasized that and not realized it was just like a pachycephalosaur (Stegoceras, to be exact) but the interior ones are right cunning little parodies of duckbills so I can see she is doing it deliberately. Almost makes me want to talk to her about doing some illos for that dino comic book I have always been plotting. Well maybe we can kick that around sometime after New Year's... {Ghad, I probably should have sent Sheryl a copy of this right away instead of publishing it a year later. And she's a veterinarian too - do you suppose she has a time machine and these were done from life?} Jes finished another terrible quarter of school and am going to California the end of the week, as usual. I don't think "deinstitutionalizing" is half as enlightened as the medieval style, by the way. We are really getting a headache up here from asshole shopkeepers who think all the crazies roaming the streets are scaring people away from their business - the economy in the shape it is in, and they blame it on the "deinstitutionalized" I am afraid the situation is going to end up much worse, cuz the crazies are out there because the mental hospitals in other states can't afford to keep them any more and no one is prepared to face the consequences of the folly of the Bos. Well, bitch bitch bitch, but it is a very stupid situation if you ask me. (Yes, and they could all be cared for quite nicely for the cost of a few of those useless comic-book weapon systems that the government is so fond of spending our tax dollars on.)
From Avram Davidson -
Thank you for igots and for anything else which you
have sent me and for which I may or may not have thanked you. I
am no "grad student in English" but I say absoutely that Milton
never wrote the words on the last page of igots;
Coleridge, maybe. Dave Hall continues to do very kind things for
me. I dedicate next year, in which I'll be 65, to getting out of
this State Veterans Home before I fall flat on my face from the
medicines they give me to keep me, in theory, from falling flat
on my face. If I don't want to become and remain an irascible
zomby I must *LEAVE* - over to you and regards all around...
(And you did get out of the Veterans Home too! Happy 65th
birthday and many more!)
From Roy Tackett -
Strange and mysterious indeed are the ways of the
science-fictional gods. Today I recieved a strange and
mysterious piece of mail. It came in an air mail envelope and
bore two 44¢ air mail stamps and your return address. It
was postmarked Atlanta, Georgia 14 December 1987.
Now you and I know that the airmail category was abolished years ago in this continuum. I can only conclude that some sort of a quantum mechanical glitch transferred this item of mail from a parallel universe not too much, removed from ours into this one in which this particular you and I exist. The contents was issue number four, dated December 1987, of It Goes On The Shelf. This is astounding! (Startling, Thrilling, Unknown, Three-Fisted Tales of Bob!) And, of course, in that other continuum there must be a Roy Tackett who is missing his copy of the fanzine put out by the Ned Brooks over there. I wish I could figure out just how that QM glitch operated. Wouldn't it be interesting to communicate with the you in another universe, comparing notes on similarities and differences?
This fmz bears a great resemblance to the one you put out. There are a number of familiar names in it. There is mention, of course, of Art Scarm and Norm Douglas but who the hell is Robert Anton Wilson? (Who the hell, indeed... Perhaps in that alternate universe New Mexico never joined the Union! If you had stayed in SFPA you would now have the great Scarm epic Werewolf vs The Vampire Woman...) As for Cuthbert on typographical errors - oh, I dunno, Ned If he had known Guinevere he might conclude that "dairy" wasn't all that much of a typographical error... (What an udderly MCP remark... Steve Fabian's depiction of Guinevere au naturel is not at all bovine. (Guinevere and Lancelot by Arthur Machen, Purple Mouth Press, 1987, opposite p.12 - at better bookstores everywhere))
From Margaret Cubberly -
Thanks for sending me IGOTS. I've got my eye on The
Pleasure Garden, sounds intriguing. The quote "To travel
hopefully..." etc. is by Robert Louis Stevenson who had some
experience along that line. Hope your new year is the same for
all of us - a change in Wash DC and the end of the era of the
Great Constipator. {By the time anyone reads this, we will have
elected a new president. Probably that ghastly preppie twit
Bush, but he won't have my vote.}
From Dainis Bisenieks -
Got IGOTS today. I'm sure others have pointed out that
Beagle's The Folk of the Air had "A Knight of Ghost and
Shadows" as a working title and duly quotes the lines. In fact,
maybe I did when I wrote you before. {Could be, but not in time
for IGOTS 4. I have seen this book, but haven't read it.} My
place is becoming in its small way a home for fallen
typewriters. Got a Royal Heritage portable at a bazaar for $3,
with case (but no key: should be easy to substitute or to make).
It's from the same period as the office machine I described: you
press the trademark to release the catch and there's cruddy foam
plastic on the inside. The clip that lifts the ribbon (someday I
must learn the short names of all these parts) had its hinged
elements flapping loose; I re-engaged the V-shaped spring that
holds them. Betcha that it is a trouble spot on this model.
Works fine now except that I get an occasional strikeover if I
go too fast. I'm doing this on my reliable old late-40-ish Royal
office machine. {I am restraining myself on typers - saw a nice
electric portable Adler today and left it. Also last week a $200
(reduced from $450) Barlock 6, it was just too far gone in rust
and a ribbon reel missing too. I offered them $50, but no dice.
I did break down and buy a Blickensderfer 5 (c.1900) - missing
the case and one key-top, but the damn thing actually works,
prints script-type so that the letters connect up.} I did,
meanwhile, pass on a Remette to a young cousin of Betsy's; it
had originally come from a relative, anyway; this keeps it in
the family. (The sales staff at Remington had a penchant for
cutesy-poo nicknames for their portables - besides the Remette,
there is also a Remie Scout.)
From Chester Cuthbert -
Thanks for sending me #4 of It Goes On The Shelf. I am
always interested in your comments about books and your mention
of important points in letters from your correspondents, and
grateful for your publication bf rare Machen material. {This is
the fifth and last of the Arthur Machen essays from the old
Dalton weekly paper, though I found I had printed them out of
order. There is one more piece already typeset in the old
computer (these computers are not compatible and won't talk to
each other, even though they both talk to the same printer).}
Sam Moskowitz visited Winnipeg for a week last May, and I gave
him the second copy of your booklet of Machen material for his
collection. He tells me that he is having trouble with
commencement of cataracts, and his wife has a serious illness
which has cost him $20,000 so far, with no end in sight. I do
not hear from him often, as he is very busy and must do
housekeeping as well as looking after their cats. (Someone in
SFPA mentioned seeing Sam, long noted in fandom for his booming
voice, on a panel at worldcon and having to use an amplifier
device to speak.) I have read none of the books you reviewed in
this issue, though I have two of them awaiting attention. I'm
bogged down with 200 hardcovers purchased at $1 each as Winnipeg
Public Library discards. It baffles me why some of these were
tossed out; many are useful for permanent reference. One of them
is a Dictionary of Literary pseudonyms. Fortunately, some
subjects concerning which I collected books years ago have lost
interest for me, so I can discard the books without regret, and
am doing so as I come across them. (I know what you mean - what
bothers me is the books I find on the shelves here on subjects
that never interested me! I just got rid of a box of technical
music books and another of books on gardening.) My space for
books is now so limited that I trade more than I buy.
From Walt Willis and Vin¢ Clarke -
Vin¢ Clarke has come to visit me again this year,
especially to write to you - like some rough beast slouching
toward Donaghadee to write a letter of comment. After a year
spent in fasting an& meditation - i.e. saving up for the
Worldcon and waiting for news from Brighton of our hotel
reservations - we are I think just about strong enough to write
a letter instead of the usual postcard. However I should tell
you that the life form portrayed in the Worldoon Locus
photographs as Vin¢ Clarke is really Chuck Harris.
Privately, I believe both of them could sue. IGOTS was as
interesting as ever. I specially enjoyed the review of The
Werewolf vs Vampire Woman. Isn't it a sobering thought that
one might write a book so bad that its only distinction is the
obloquay (an Irishism?) of its reviews.
For your information, runnels are shallow water channels and screes are slopes of loose stones. (You mean like the beach at Brighton? I heard at NoLaCon that you will have been in Florida for Tropicon in December, wish I could have gotten down there!)
Vin¢ here: I'm not sure that I came here to write a letter - it was more or less to help WAW put the postcard in the printer the right way up and sundry tasks like that (licking the stamp, for instance). However, he's right about the Locus picture. I'm thinking that it's worth at least $20,000 in lost reputation, unauthorised use of name, etc. I shall have to get one of these topflight US lawyers. I hear there's a guy named Perry Mason who's pretty good. (You shall have to send me Chuck Harris' address so he can enjoy all these insults!)
I'm also not sure that I can agree with your new correspondent Arthur Machen about the glamour of sweaty toil - "after a mighty draught of the cold drink, back to the work again..." etc. Of course, after a number of these visits for refreshment it might be "staggering back to work", but on the whole I can see our mighty peasant as lying dying on his simple bed at 48 years old, racked with rheumatism, arthritis and alcoholism.
As part of my long and varied career I once had a job in a coal-yard, unloading the stuff into wagons and subsequently decanting it into sacks, and there were plenty of pangs. Of course, I didn't drink to deaden the pain, either. As I recall it, that was about the time I discovered peanut butter, and I used to take mighty mouthfuls of coal-dust and peanut butter sandwiches, but they didn't deaden anything except possibly the roots of my hair. At least, my hair started to leave me at that time, tho' come to think of it that may have been due to the nightly washings with detergent, which was also a New Thing. (I had no idea that peanut butter was available over there in your younger days, when it would have had to be transported across the Atlantic by sailing ship. When I was young we lived in Chile and had to make our own peanut butter. I cannot remember how we pulverized the peanuts - sledgehammer, explosives, steamroller?)
No, I think AM is taking a typical airy-fairy romantic view; if he thought the peasant's life was so wonderful, why didn't he take off his coat and forget his worries in some jolly backbreaking hard labour? (I suspect that for Machen to become a peasant is even more impossible than for the peasant to become an intellectual - you can't put the genie back in the bottle!)
Of course, you can tell Machen is one of the literati - "mighty draught of the cold drink" indeed! A plain and simple writer like myself would just have put "a big swallow" and then been surprised that our words weren't discussed 56 years later in a fanzine.
The quote on the back page doesn't really ring with 18th century authenticity. A "prudently unregarded adherence to a constructed creed" doesn't sound kosher. Sounds more like Patrick Nielsen Hayden to me. Unfortunately, mine host's library he's taken - the dog for a walk - is like in most fan's homes scattered over every room, nook, cranny and corner of this Victorian mansion and I don't even have a clue as to what room to search for Coleridge.
Aren't they arranged, sez you? Listen, I get up from the armchair and take just one shelf of the bookcase in front of me. The Cruise of the Conrad. Short Stories of H G Wells. Firestarter. Balzac. Larousse Dictionnaire. 6 volumes of Proust. A tape of the Goon Show. Tey's Franchise Affair. Stevenson's Catriona. 2 more volumes of Proust. Crime and Punnishment. Trollope's The Claverings. An unidentified 5" tape... Depressing, ain't it? Here he comes again, glowing and wet from a typical Irish AM... (I met Patrick Nielsen-Hayden in New Orleans at breakfast in the hotel. He had to dash but Teresa N-H and I talked for a while and took snapshots of each other - I'm sure mine looks better than hers!)
Yes, it's me (WAW) again, the dog having dragged me round the block, if you can call a block something that consists largely of unreconstructed countryside. By the way if you see our mutual, or to be pedantic, common {oh, never common} friend Jim Goldfrank tell him that the dog that bit him is dead; and that we are drawing no tendentious inferences from that except that it's safe for him to visit us again. Though perhaps I should admit that at the moment our current dog is an exuberant puppy and any visitor is in peril of being licked to death, a fate no doubt of similar horror to that visited on the victims of the offspring of The Werewolf and the Vampire Woman. (Sorry to hear about your dog. I had breakfast with Goldfrank just last Saturday, he had been visiting family in Virginia Beach and was on his way back to Reston, an artificial suburb of Baghdad-on-the-Potomac.)
Best, and thanks again for IGOTS. Roll on Xmas 1988.
Vin¢ here saying goodbye with a brilliant thought - we could get the puppy (all 50 lb of him) to lick the stamp... at last a use for Man's Best Friend! (I knew there was some reason I should get a dog - just think of the stamps I'll have to lick to get this issue mailed (ptui!).)
From Mark Valentine -
In IGOTS 4, Tom Cockcroft notes that Francis Thompson's poem
"Tom O'Bedlam" uses 25 of the first 40 lines of the 16th century
poem of the same title, and you wonder whether he acknowledged
this source on first publication of his own poem. By
coincidence, the other day I bought a copy of The Dome
number 5, May Day 1898, which contains what I take to be the
first appearance of Thompson's poem. It is prefaced by the note
"Written round selected verses - the third and fourth stanzas
and the first five lines of the first stanza in the following
poem - from the well-known song in Wit and Drollery". This
exonerates one of our gentle poets from any suggestion of
covert plagiarism! (What Jung called synchronicity, that you
should find that magazine in time for the next issue of IGOTS.
Thanks!)
Hope all is well with you. I rather wish IGOTS would come out more often, it's such a pleasant and eccentric read. Do you do anything else like it? (Very kind of you to say so! I do very short-run zines for SFPA and Slanapa, but they are not really much like IGOTS, being mostly comments on comments, pointless and incomprehensible in-jokes, etc. Of course some commentary on books does creep in.)
Details overleaf of the latest Caermaen publication, not all Machen this time, but several items by him, and a splendid pastiche by Ron Weighell, based on a fragment in The London Adventure, which some readers have sworn we could have passed off as genuine Machen. (Greatly enjoyed the AKLO! Whether I would have taken the Weighell piece for Machen is impossible to say. It is very good. The preface to Chronicle of Clemendy is good too - the one Machen book I haven't read. Great art by Hunter and Coulthart. Did the AKLO II get out this summer as promised? I try to avoid promising publication! AKLO is £2 (but this was a pre-Summer'88 discount price) from 109 Oak Tree Road, Bitterne Park, Southampton, 502 4PJ, England)
Also news of the Ghost Story Society just founded here in England - please spread the word however you may. (The Society, founded by Mark, Rosemary Pardoe, and Jeff Dempsey, promises a frequent newsletter for devotees of supernatural fiction in the tradition of Arthur Machen, M. R. James, Walter de Ia Mare, Algernon Blackwood, etc. A year's membership for USA residents is $12 - send to Jeff Dempsey, 2 Looe Road, Croxteth, Liverpool, L11 6LJ, England.)
Also heard from were Ray Zorn and probably several others whose letters I neglected to throw in the right box; and Alexis Gilliland, who sent Art, as you can see!
Sydney Smith was an 18th-century literary wit. The booklet
consists of a brief biography interspersed with quotes from
Sydney himself, who said, upon founding the Edinburgh
Review, "I never read a book before reviewing it; it
prejudices a man so" and "There is no furniture as charming as
books" - a man after my own heart! These booklets seem to run
about 20 pages counting the covers and are very nicely designed
and printed on good paper. This one cost me $1.
Has any one here read Beroaldus Juvelius on the Fallibility of Human Judgement? I daresay not. This great folio, printed at Lubeck in the year 1615, when the Rosicrucian controversy was at its height, as it might be a living, and blazing example of that fallibility of judgement which the prudent Juvelius weighed, examined, anatomized, was in its own day overwhelmed by the occult follies of the age. It slept as it was born; no one has been curious enough to awaken it.
Yet the book deals with matters of everlasting interest, and everyday interest too, to every one of us. We are making judgements each other minute of our lives, every man jack of us from the highest mathematician to the man who feeds the pigs. Einstein forms his judgement as to Space-Time; the pig man forms his judgement as to the capacities of the pig with the black spot for fattening up and some one in between the two forms a judgement as to my prose, and decides that it is horrid. And there goes a man to the scaffold, and a noose, and violent death: on the judgement of twelve of his fellows. What right has any one of these to his judgements; from Einstein to the jury-man? What ground have we for receiving them, for giving them our assent? Can we test them? If so, what are the tests?
Such in bare outline, are some of the topics which engaged the attention of the learned Swede - or, more probably, Finn - of the early seventeenth century and it seems to me that they are as alive now, in the early twentieth century, as they were then. Indeed, I have had an instance of this urgent modernity within the last twenty-four hours. Last night, Mr. Desmond McCarthy, an esteemed critic, an admirable judge of a good book and a bad book, and of the difference between them, was broadcasting his opinion of that queer production, the Life of George Bernard Shaw by Frank Harris and George Bernard Shaw. "I read every word of it with interest," said Mr. McCarthy in effect, "but it is a literary monstrosity." And he went on to compare it, immensely to its disadvantage, with the Life of Henrik Ibsen, recently translated from the Norwegian: a perfect biography, according to Mr. McCarthy; a great picture of a great man.
Very good. But this morning I open The Daily Telegraph, and read a criticism of this very life of Ibsen by that most eminent and judicious critic, Mr J. C. Squire. And Mr. Squire, says, quite frankly, that he found the book so intolerably, so intensely dull that his strongest resolution was needed to carry him through it. It was a black London fog to him, with only here and there a ray of light, when Ibsen was allowed to speak in his own person.
And the best of it is this. At the beginning of his article, Mr. Squire quoted two or three paragraphs from Quarterly Review. The reviewer, poor man, had to deal with "Endymion" by John Keats. He read, the first book he says, and could make nothing of it; and so he felt that it would safe to leave the other three unread. Mr. Squire agrees that the Quarterly critic was wrong; but wishes that he had the courage to follow his example in leaving three parts of the life of Ibsen to awaken it.
Yet the book deals with matters of everlasting interest, and everyday interest too, to every one of us. We are making judgements each other minute of our lives, every man jack of us, from the highest mathematician to the man who feeds the pigs. Einstein forms his judgement as to Space-Time; the pig man forms his judgement as to the capacities of the pig with the black spot for fattening up - and some one in between the two forms a judgement as to my prose, and~ decides that Johnson considered "Lycidas" to be a compound of bad taste and worthless poetry; while to Keats and his friends, Johnson's poetry was a joke. Carlyle, again, found nothing in Keats but a "maudlin, weak-eyed sensibility," and discovered Lamb to be a drunken Cockney, with a "frostified," very offensive, humour.
And all these, judges and judged, were great men; among the greatest of men. "If they do these things in the green tree..."
But, after all, these are merely literary judgements? What, then, about the judgements of those useful, homely, practical, organs; the palate and the stomach? They have in Touraine, the land of Rabelais, the land of stout eaters of fine dishes, of chosen drinkers of good wine, a great delicacy: little cheeses made of goats' cream. I saw them, snowy white, nesting in green vine leaves, as they put on the dessert in the sixteenth century inn, La Crouxille. I helped myself with eager anticipation: received the essence of a whole herd of mountain goats; and thought my mouth was withered for ever more. And, you remember the Banquet after the Manner of the Ancients in "Peregrine Pickle"? The host said that he was a little uncertain as to the nitron of the ancients; so in making the classic soup, he had used assafetida instead. Well; the French marquis said the soup was excellent, on his word of honour; but he was taken home in his sedan chair, in a sad state, soon afterwards. But the German baron finished his plate and asked for more. Do you know what is the great Christmas dish in Germany at the present day? It is carp, boiled in beer, and eaten with sweet cakes. You think, I suppose, that such a dish would be horribly nasty; sickening perhaps. But my Tourainian friend, M. Venier, told me that he had once eaten lamb with mint sauce. "I didn't like it," he said, and there was a bitter emphasis in his tones that let me know he was putting his judgement into gentle words, to spare my feelings. I am free to confess, on the other side, that young lamb without mint sauce is to me as a sonnet that lacks the final crowning line; a thing imperfect, maimed; joy turned into sorrow and regret.
Let it be understood that all the while I am following my author, old Beroaldus Juvelius. The argument, if you can find it, is his; I have merely fitted it with modern, or more or less modern, instances. And, still following him; let me relate how I was sitting one afternoon with some friends, at Henckey's, in the Strand. One of the men said to another: "You know Confucius has come through?" He lowered his voice a little, but I heard him and exclaimed, "What?" in a voice of such rasping virulence that the waiters started, and regarded me with surprise and rebuke.
But what ground had I for my implied judgement: that the spirit of the great Kung, who died about two thousand five hundred years ago, had by no means manifested itself at any seance of the Spiritualists? There may be, or there may not be, an answer to this question, "in our next."
[Editorial note - The five Arthur Machen essays reprinted from the Dalton Georgia Citizen in the first five issues of It Goes On The Shelf were used without regard to the original order of their publication. I see now that the above essay should have preceded The Strange Tale of Mt. Nephin, which I used in It Goes On The Shelf No.3. I will put down here the titles in the order of their original publication:
The Glitter of The Brook, 10-29-31 (IGOTS 1)It had occurred to me to publish the five essays as a booklet, but I doubt the demand would justify the effort. For anyone who came in late and wants a complete set, I can have one made at the local photocopy shop for $2-3.
Trailing Old Beroaldus, 1-14-32 (IGOTS 5)
The STrange Tale of Mt. Nephin, 2-11-32 (IGOTS 3)
The Pictures on the Cards, 3-10-32 (IGOTS 4)
That 0ther World, 4-14-32 (IGOTS 2)
Faith is not an exotic bloom to be laboriously maintained by the exclusion of most aspects of the day to day world, nor a useful delusion to be supported by sophistries and half-truths like a child's belief in Father Christmas - not, in short, a prudently unregarded adherence to a constructed creed; but rather must be, if anything, a clear-eyed recognition of the patterns and tendencies, to be found in every piece of the world's fabric, which are the lineaments of God. This is why religion can only be advice and clarification, and cannot carry any spurs of enforcement - for only belief and behavior that is independently arrived at, and then chosen, can be praised or blamed. This being the case, it can be seen as a criminal abridgement of a person's rights willfully to keep him in ignorance of any facts or opinions - no piece can be judged inadmissible, for the more stones, both bright and dark, that are added to the mosaic, the clearer is our picture of God.
The above quotation is from a speech about John Milton by Charles Taylor Coleridge, contained in The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers, published by Ace as an original paperback novel in December 1983. Perhaps some graduate student in English Literature can tell us whether Milton or Coleridge ever really said any such thing - I like it anyway, and will keep it around on this page of It Goes On The Shelf until I find something I like better as representing the proper attitude of a journalist.
This fanzine will not be sold. It will not even be distributed in the usual sense of mailing out a lot of the copies at once. This tired old fan will just send it through SFPA and Slanapa, and in trade as zines come in, and to correspondents as letters go out. If you should hear of it and feel you must have a copy, you may send a SASE for lack of anything better. If there is to be much art in future issues, I will need some good line art - no tone, no solid blacks, no shading except for dot or line - suitable for thermal stencil. I do not have to have the original, a good xerox is fine.
For those interested in the gruesome technical details, this fanzine is composed in FancyFont using WordStar on an Osborne microcomputer and a Toshiba 1100+ laptop PC. It is printed on a RexRotary M4 mimeograph from stencils cut directly by the Epson MX-80 dot-matrix printer. Art is printed from thermal mimeo stencils cut by a 3M Thermofax machine.
And don't forget to ask yourself -
Do you know where your ACLU card is? Mine is is my wallet, but I must confess that I never knew quite why. What did the famous card-carrying Communists of the McCarthyite 50s use theirs for? Could they charge stuff at the local Party cell?