A wonderful little item I came to know in the 1970’s was the Fanzine.  These were nice little home published magazines that started in the 30’s by SF fans and in the 50’s by Comic fans. Some of the copy methods were very crude.

Now the fun part of the zines were they were like the social networks on the Internet today.  Instead of posting - we made zines.  There were people who would do art for them, others who would do articles and stories.  Some would even have Comics stories in them.  And we would have our LOC or letter pages.  We would write back and forth, and we would review one another zines.  It was a lot of fun and we got a lot of friends that we never had a chance to meet (and we have found some of them on Facebook).

The computer which gives a format to do really nice looking zines today has also just about done away with the zine.  Websites cost less and can be seen my many more people. Email list and social networks have done away with the LOC.  The e-zine is the child of the fanzine, except they cover many more topics than the fanzines ever did. (We would see music, non-SF movies and TV move into some of them, but Comics and SF stayed the main stay of Fanzines.)

 

When we started Florida Fandom we had several choices of how to print it. 1. Ditto, 2. Mimeograph 3. Offset at a quick print shop was all that was open to us.  Photo copies were around, but were very poor and cost about 25¢ a page. It cost around $15 to get 100 copies of a 12 page digest size zine offset printed.  Now to keep cost down we had to put it together and staple it, but that was the fun part.  Before we could take it to the printer we had to put together a camera ready originals. This took a lot of cutting and pasting using scissors and paste.  And if we wanted titles we had to use press type. (Believe me using a computer and a word processor you can do much more than we could back then).  As time went on the cost kept getting higher and the  size of the issue  got bigger.  Soon it was costing around $100 for a 100 issues... This made time between issues grow larger (most issues went out as comps). Then to save the day came the Super Office Supplies stores with low cost high quality photocopiers and the cost came down again to under $20.00. We did Florida Fandom from 1976 till the mid -90 when we took it online as a website.  In 2011 celebrating it 35th year we came out with an e-zine version with many of the people who helped put out the originals giving us stories and art along with some who were not born when the zine first came out.

To see more about Florida Fandom go to www.floridafandom.com on the site we have the web version along with the e-zine in PDF format for you to download or read on line. Also check out Florida Fandom on Facebook.