Fandom is obession, fandom is focus

This past year, as part of a fanzine preservation project, I've been contacting many of the original Star Trek fanzine publishers.   A few weeks ago, I emailed Roberta Rogow who created an amazing index of all the Star Trek fan fiction published (to date) in 1976.  And while I knew she had created an 'index' and that a lot of work must have gone into it, it was not until I held a print copy of the index in my hand that I realized what an amazing job she did.

In days before computers, when stone knives and bearskins roamed the earth, there were no searchable indexes, no Google, no storyfinder communities, no forums or twitter or tumblr and no way to find that "zine that contained the plomeek soup recipe" or "that Capt Kirk story where he went looking for the Loch Ness monster but was captured by aliens and was tortured but then Spock saved him."*

Her index cross-references:
The zines by title
The zine publishers by name
The stories by title
The authors by name

The she lists contents by subject:
Stories with Klingons as adversaries
Stories with Klingons as protagonists
Convention reviews
Fanzine reviews
Zine with Recipes
Stories that feature the Loch Ness monster
Capt James T Kirk, Torture and Death stories
Stories based on myths and legends
Stories about slavery

and the list goes on and on and on... She didn't just do one index, she did several with updates and additions as fans kept creating.


*No I do not know if that story exists. But if you find it, let me know?

My God, It's Full Of Stars .... I Mean Zines!

I had an interesting chat with a zine fan this weekend. She wondered why Fanlore was not tagging or categorizing fanzines by subject: angst, hurt/comfort etc. so she could find zines based on her interests. Putting aside the fact that most anthology zines do  not have a single theme (novels are different), the majority of people working on Fanlore don’t have access to the physical zines, let alone the ability to read them all to come up with categories.

Even using the vast existing Internet resources that date back to the early 1990s, assembling info on a specific zine is tricky. There have been other fans who have created extensive databases and indexes (I blogged about the paper Trekindex today), and there are fandom specific ones like the Karen Halliday Star Trek Zine index, the Star Wars Collector’s Bible, The Starsky & Hutch Compendium and…..well I started a list of these online zine indexes in 2009 here.

The bottom line is that fanzine info is scattered across the Internet and basic fanzine history continues to be lost due to inactivity, neglect, gaffiating, death, and entropy. This makes locating even the simplest info - like tables of contents, story titles, fandoms, page counts and dates -- a monumental undertaking. A monumentally *insane* undertaking as there  are (we guess) 8,000+ fanzines listed on Fanlore. Which makes Fanlore the first and only comprehensive multi-fandom media fanzine listing in media fandoms’ history. Ever. (Or, as I sometimes jokingly call it, it is Fandom's First Memory Alpha....but I will reserve that title for another fanzine history preservation project).

Which is why I am so grateful when someone does take a moment – like the fan I mentioned above – to let me know that they are finding Fanlore’s fanzine index useful and want to make it more useful.*

*Many zine fans use Fanlore to buy and sell their used fanzines or to look for some of their old favorite stories and fandoms. If a zine story is now online, Fanlore can provide a link to the story. And of course if the zine is still for sale, there will be a link to the publisher, agent or distributor.