FANZINES

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 or 40'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 Internet of today.  Instead of doing email and list and bulletin boards - we did zines.   There people who do art for them, others would do articles and stories.  Some would even have comic book 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 great fun and we got a lot of friends that we never had a chance to meet.

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

When we started Florida Fandom we had several choice of how to print 1) Ditto 2)mimeograph 3) offset at a quickprint.  Photo copies were around, but were very poor and cost about twenty five cents a page.  I had no access to Ditto or Mimeograph, so the quickprint offset was all that was open to me .   It cost to get 100 copies of a 12 page digest size zine around $15.00.  Now to keep the 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 used press type. (Believe me doing a page today using a computer and a word processor you can do much more than we could back then).  As time went on the cost keep getting higher and the size of the zine was getting more pages.  Soon it was costing almost a $100 for a 100 issues...this made the time between issues grow much larger (most issues went out as comps)  Then to save the day came the Super Office supply stores with low cost high great photocopiers and the cost came down again to under $20.00.