K32


K32, an APAzine for PIECES OF EIGHT, Mar. '93, from A. Vincent Clarke, 16 Wendover Way, Welling, Kent, DA16 2BN. "SF's no good", they bellow till we're deaf./ "But this looks good." – "Well then, it's not SF." – Robert Conquest: The Abomination of Moab.


UPDATE

Tommy Ferguson, ex member of PoE (but may be re-joining us) came around to look at the multitudinous wonders of 16WWW for a weekend. We went to Greenwich on the Sunday. Tommy bought some cømic bøøks adult graphic novels and a collection of Escher drawings (in postcard form), and at a shop called JUNK SHOP I bought a Chinese boat....no, no, that was a joke. I mean 12 Analogs, for £5. We didn't go to the Maritime Museum as it's off season, only opening at 2pm., and as it was cold enough to paralyse a Polar bear we shivered our way back to 16WWW and a video of DR CYCLOPS.

Otherwise, I had OUTWORLDS 65 (Ed. Bill Bowers) which contains the finished biography of old-time London fan Frank Arnold by ex-Brit. fan Dave Rowe, previously mentioned here. Lot of photos too, mostly of '50s fans. Like the other 7000 fanzines here, open for borrowing.

HISTORICAL COMMENTS

Ken Cheslin, and possibly others, have been uttering slightly discontented noises about PoE, and making comparisons with OMPA. I thought it might be interesting to check over an OMPA mailing to see what they were talking about.

The Off Trail Magazine Publishers Association, a rather torturous title put together to enable us to use the marvellously acceptable acronym, was founded in 1954. It eventually faded away in 1978, Ken Cheslin, the late Roberta Gray and Keith Walker being as far as I can find out the last three stalwarts.

OMPA issued quarterly mailings, had three officers, a President, an Association Editor, and a Treasurer. The membership was fixed at 45, membership requirements being 16 quarto (10" x 8") pages during the year, plus 6/- cash (about 30p.)

I took the March '58 mailing as being the nearest in seasonal activity to this PoE. The official zine, OFF TRAILS, shows a total of 288 pages that mailing, and gives an amended total for the previous mailing (ie. including postmailings) of 370 pages.

At that time OMPA had the following members:

British – 25

American – 16

Belgium, New Zealand, Canada & Germany – 1 each.

The waiting list consisted of 6 Americans, 4 British, 1 Canadian, 1 New Zealander.

The high proportion of Americans in the above was probably caused by the FAPA, SAPS and other APA waiting lists being too extended – it was not unusual to wait 2 years to join FAPA.

OMPA mailing No 15, March '58 was as follows:

FANANNIA – Anna Steul (German), 6p; This lady was in England for 14 days around the '57 World Con, and the zine has reports of her theatre visits then, some news of German rocket experiments, and (not credited) a 16p. German magazine with everything from a serpent swallowing a large egg (they dislocate their jaws) to an article on Sartre (I think).

ARCHIVE – Archie Mercer. 14 pages, of which the first 9 are rambling comments much like you've seen in 'K', and the rest personal comments of fannish doings. In the comments there's a list of questions addressed to American members:

1. What precisely is a sub-treasury?

2. What is a bagel?

3. What is meant by 'the numbers game'?

4. How did 'Empire' get into the Empire State Building?

5. What is a 'kewpie doll'?

PARAFANALIA Bruce Burn of New Zealand. 19pp. This was both an OMPAzine and a zine published to fandom as a whole. A short story, letters, an article by John Berry ('The Psychology of the Gafiate'), and an editorial page. This is an entirely 'inside fandom' zine; nothing on the 'outside' world at all.

PHENOTYPE – Dick Eney, USA. 8 pages (wrongly credited as '5' in official records). This is hektographed, and after 35 years seems to consist mostly of blots. There's a lot of rambling mailing comments, some with political overtones, and an interesting note:

Bob Leman got a trifle indignant at my characterising the 'culture I tend to think of all fans as sharing' as being the Elective-Democratic, Scientific-Intellectual-Agnostic one, pointing out that practically all the Western Powers rated the first pair of adjectives, practically none the second, and the last constituted somewhat unfair discrimination, it being unfair to fling Gertie Carr into Outer Darkness merely because she's a theist. ((This lady raised the hackles of a number of fans of the time for various reasons – a sort of Mrs. Thatcher of fandom.))

DOGIE – Bob Pavlat, USA. 9 pages. There's 3½ closely argued pages about increasing the input of new blood into British fandom, with reference to an article of mine which later sparked off interest in establishing a society, and contains some personal explanation – "I am not, and since 1948 I have not been interested in more science fiction readers. Nor am I in favour of more fringe-fans; the semi-dead conventioneers or collectors or other blotter-paper fans willing to absorb but unwilling to put pen to paper, willing to be entertained but unwilling to effect fair return to whatever extent their talents and time allow." The rest of the zine is mailing comments.

FANZINE INDEX 3: Bob Pavlat, USA. This is the third instalment of a listing of all fanzines published from 'the beginning' to 1952. 25pp.

VAGARY – Bobbie Wild (later 'Gray'), 36pp. Starts off with 10 pages of mailing comments and then 6 pages of general rambling which begins with Richard III ( a favourite subject) and goes on to mention a Sunday Times article on best books of the year, C.S. Lewis, the black market, Germany after the War, Scottish scenery and a family tree of the Gods of the House of Llyr. Then a 17p article on King Arthur, including two more family trees.

SULFURYC – As above – One page reply to Chuch Harris in an argument they were having about TAFF.

SIZAR – Bruce Burn (again) – NZ; 4pp. of fan stories

TALES FROM THE OUBLIETTE – Mercer (again) – 25pp. Part 2 of a fictional tale set in S. America.

SCOTTISHE ((Pronounced Scotty-she)) – Ethel Lindsay – 18p. Four pages of mailing comments, three of personal stuff including details of her training as a nurse, 5 pages of a John Berry story, a 1½ page account by a friend of an incident, including info. that when he was not quite 16, his weekly wage, after various deductions, was 27/6d. Also an account of the Aetherius Society, which had a Cosmic Lord and spoke to Jesus on Mars...and managed to hire quite a big hall in central London to give out their messages.

MORPH – John Roles – 16p. Includes 4 p. on his travels in Singapore and the Far East, a continuing list of what books he had and some comments on them (this instalment moved from No. 1000 to 1018), 6-and-a-bit pages of mailing comments, and a note that on a previous MORPH cover he'd used a flat-bed duplicator and 6 different colours. ((Roles was the biggest experimenter in the early days of OMPA)).

THE RON BENNETT APPRECIATION ISSUE – 4p – John Berry & Arthur Thomson; an appreciative but funny page ("Bennett, to my mind, is a compleat faaan. He hasn't sold out to the pros..."), and a 3-page fable of the far future – And how proud Bennett 279 had been when he'd stencilled '15,000th. year of publication' on the front cover.

VERITAS – Berry & Thomson again – 16 pages – Alas, not in the bundle.

HOW – Paul Enever – 9p. ((Paul started fanning about 1935, after which he gafiated for 17 years)). A page of oddments, another of mailing comments, 3 on my aforementioned suggestions for starting a society, and 3 on a fable.

SATAN'S CHILD – Dorothy Ratigan – 5p., 2 from Dorothy and 3 from Ted Tubb about the society idea.

CHUX OWN – Chuch Harris – 6 pages, starting with a blast about TAFF (see Rob Hansen's THEN 2 for details). Some nice quotable bits, the shortest being "My main trouble is that I can never divorce fandom from my ordinary life". Ummm – looking at it again, it's all quotable.

DIRECTORY OF 1957 SF FANDOM – Ron Bennett. Yes, in those primitive times you could write details of name, address and status of about 400 fans and be sure that all your friends were mentioned. Ron also listed 40 1957 fanzine titles, but this only included a few US zines that crossed the Pond; among editors named were Tom Reamy, Mike Moorcock, Greg Benford, Terry Carr... In the Directory proper, under 'A' (first letter of surname) there are 12 American, 4 English, 2 Dutch, 1 Swedish fannish names and addresses.

THE LESSER FLEA – Joy Clarke – 7p, five of comments, one cover, one page on Bank Holidays, advertising papers and the rates for temporary jobs as charged by agencies, eg. £9-9/- for a shorthand-typist per week, whereas the employee herself got £8-8/- before income tax and insurance deductions.

BLUNT – 'Sandy' Sanderson – 26p. Six pages of mailing comments, plus four pages of comment on the new society article, an idea for a First International Bank of Fandom, articles on Merlin, jazz, and a debate on Speech using quotations by famous names.

LAUNCHING SITE – A. Vincent Clarke – 9 pages. All mailing comments, rambling as usual. "I forgot to mention talking budgies...When the famous convoy was coming back from the SuperManCon in '54, we stopped at a cafe on the outskirts of North London, and in a cage there they had a bird which was too small for a parrot. This Thing, which, not being a bird – fancier myself I shall not positively identify as a budgie, was chattering away to itself in an incredibly small voice. It reminded me of the time in the '20s when the BBC used to broadcast greetings to children whose birthday dates were sent up at the appropriate time... you know, "Uncle Henry wishes little Tommy Titmouse, 4 years old today, a V-E-R-R-Y Happy Birthday...." So Pop lay the earphone of our crystal set in a washbowl, so we all heard me wished a happy birthday in a tiny tinny voice echoing from the bowl. (Can't you imagine the light of scientific speculation suddenly start up in the eyes of that little golden-haired who was listening so intently? You can't? How'd you get so cynical?). Anyway, this caged Thing reminded me of that tiny tinny voice. The only trouble was, I couldn't understand a word it was saying. Of course, it may have been a foreign bird."

RUNE – Norman Wansborough – 2p. Another missing zine.

QUESTIONNAIRE: MAN IN SPACE – John Roles – 2p. Reprinted from a column in NEW SCIENTIST, as anthropolgists and others wanted to know 'how human customs and habits will change as Man sails from Earth into Space'. John wanted fans to co-operate on this, but I feel the questions may have been a bit too naive for your hardened sf reader, eg. (8) Why do we need rockets for Space Travel – why can't we just build a big aeroplane and fly it out there?

OFF TRAILS – The official 'zine. 10p, inc. 2 pages of rules. Discussion on amendments to this Constitution, also a note not included in the previous OFF TRAILS that at the '57 World Con there was an OMPA meeting at which 19 members (out of 45) were present.


Summing up, I didn't realise before plunging into this review that the area devoted to 'comments' would be skewed because of space given to my article in the previous mailing, but it does seem that there were more mailing comments in those days.

There was, as I've suspected, more involvement with fanzine fandom – who, these days, would include even a shortened Directory here for the benefit of PoE'ns? There wasn't so much nostalgia, mostly because OMPA members were too busy on current fan affairs, putting out their own fanzines or writing for others. As an example (but remember he was in the Army with a bit more spare time than most), look at Sandy Sanderson's record as specified in BLUNT:

1957 – Letters Out: 1051. Letters In: 908. Due to some doubling up, there were in fact only 16 fans submitting material for this particular mailing, (an average of 18pp each) but aside from any other considerations, the material requirement of 16pp per year meant that you could, if you wished, splash everything into one mailing and sit back for the rest of it.

And, inevitably, one gets the impression that the fan family was closer knit then – to many fandom was a Way Of Life rather than a Goddamned Hobby.


MAILING COMMENTS

So, stretching, back to 1993, and the sudden realisation that this month has only 28 days in it (and 29 in each Leap Year), so one is deprived of two or three and the deadline lurches that bit nearer.....

THROUGH THE SPEAKING TRUMPET – JDR

Welcome Tara and Barry, and another smoooth TTST....ghod, you should have been a diplomat, John.

PM ROUTINES 2 – Andrew Butler

Good on Security Systems. Me, I just neglect the front garden (an extraordinarily easy thing to do) but not so much that passing burglars suspect that a miser lives here with a hoard of gold. Houses on either side have been burgled (one was a walk-in, which I suppose really doesn't count), but I've been lucky so far. Incidentally, I would have thought a resident fire would have been the time when you wanted all help possible?

STRANGE DEBRIS 10 – Chris Carne

I'm a bit puzzled by the your mention that you nearly (nearly?) always feel cheated after watching Hickson as 'Miss Marples'..."I feel I've spent two hours watching a load of old tosh dressed up as serious television". Surely one watches these things for that overpowering sense of nostalgia, even if one has never lived in a country cottage? Though I find one item strangely deficient in these lovingly produced plays – the absence of cats. Surely Miss M. should have been smothered in them?

You touch my conscience (hands off!) in the bit on disabled people's protests. We had a Post Office in Welling with just a 4-step access. No one piped up. Should I have done? Now this PO has been transferred, so the situation doesn't arise. And when the Public Library was refurbished a couple of years ago, there was a wide ramp built on the outside for access. So someone's learnt.

MARAUDER 2/4 – Ken Cheslin

A blank inside cover? Wait a moment while I look outside to see if the heavens are falling. RYCT Sarah: Agree all the way. If some of these administrators had to keep class themselves...oh boy.

RYCT Maureen – enjoyed. Re. the comparison of OMPA with PoE, of course the mailing I've cited may be different in character from the later ones in which you participated, but I certainly had the impression that remarks of the type Theo calls 'Comment hook and I' (shall we call it CHAI?) were more widespread. It's certainly the one I favour. You guessed?

RYCT Carol: One consideration that might tell in the case for and against word processors is the desk space involved. This little bunch takes up 16" x 6" for keyboard, 15" x 12" for the Monitor, 16" x 8" for the printer...excuse me for using Olde Englyshe measurements. Actually, I house the lot on the top of a desk 16" x 33". Unless you have something like the latter area available, it makes things very dodgy. Derek was worrying about this recently when we were corresponding re. his newly-acquired W/P.

The back pages re. methods of writing interesting, but everyone has his own tricks.. I've always had a sneaking regard for the method of avoiding writer's snow blindness (gazing at a white sheet of paper) – just type anything, just to get the fingers working. Mind you, with some writers that seems all they do.

K31 – self

I found PHANTASMAGORIA (being small, it had got itself into a pile of A4 and stayed hidden until the day before Derek compassionately sent me a second copy) and have duly locced it. I thought Derek's selection of pieces showed fine editorial taste, with just a few contemporary (c. early '50s, I mean) references to cause a raised eyebrow or two. For instance, the reference to NIRVANA in John Allen's story.

During the war, Ken Bulmer was an active fan for a time, before service life swamped him. After the war, when I was sharing a flat with him, he brought together some remnants of material that he hadn't used, and issued a very slim fanzine called NIRVANA. It dropped into letter-boxes sometime in '49....and the rest was silence. Only one fan ever locced it – Walt Willis.

To the twisted fannish minds of the time, this was too good an opportunity to miss. NIRVANA was elevated into fannish mythology as THE fanzine, the one that had the cream of fandom (and a few pros) writing for it, but was only available by invitation. References to NIRVANA reviews circulated in the fan press, when a reference was needed NIRVANA was always to hand, and it made a damned good excuse – "Sorry I haven't written lately, been busy on NIRVANA."

In those days, when a Convention loomed, quite often an organiser wrote around to fan editors of the day asking them for sample zines, and these were incorporated in a 'Combozine' which was available during the Con. In 1954 I got a lot of innocent pleasure in sending a (fully justified) 4-page sample NIRVANA to the SuperManCon, where it appeared alongside 9 other publications..."it is with no little gratification that we can, on the eve of the publication of our 5th. anniversary issue, look back on 5 years of regular and punctual publication...". Besides a Bob Shaw piece on Walt Willis, which was deliberately cut off in mid-stream, there was a one page story, The Knife, by Ted Tubb. Years later I found out that he'd actually sold the thing.

Oh yes, we had some innocent fannish fun.

ARACHNAPHILIA – Jenny Glover

Just marvellous, marvellous, marvellous. Even tho', personally, I mutter "Hence you long-legged spinners, hence!" along with WS.

DAY FOR NIGHT – Paul Kincaid

Nice exposition of Turn of the Screw. And to my mind even nicer about the sound recording.

And even better (superlatives abound) is your answer to Sarah and her horrible scholastic adventures. And I think what upsets you is perfectly legitimate. There is a distinction amongst children, between those who like learning and those who endure it. The difference must lie in parental attitudes as much as the child's own personal tastes.

I thought at one time that slightly soppy 'flower power' parents was an answer. If you take an impressionable child, say between 8 and 13, growing up between, say, '65 & '70, then by the time it started to have kids, say at 22, this would bring the date up to 1979. Put on another 8 – 10 years and you're up to the mid-'80s. Was there a qualitative difference, based on the rather shaky date structure involved? There certainly seems to be a lessening of respect for authority – not legal authority, but that wielded by school teachers.

That's just an idea, tossed in because....well, there just doesn't seem to be an authoritative answer.

RYCT Maureen, again an interesting perspective on fandom as she was and is – and will be? On the question of one type of fandom coming after another, first fanzine, then Con fandom, etc., you seem to be striving towards another fannish theory that was tossed up in the air a couple of generations ago and is still floating in the memory of some of us old-timers – cyclic fandom. A chap named Jack Speer started this off in the forties, and it was taken up by Silverberg (yes, the Silverberg) in the early '50s. I won't go into this at length, because I've written a LoC to Ken Cheslin on THE OLAF ALTERNATIVE which runs on about it.

I thoroughly enjoyed DAY FOR NIGHT. Thanks.

PLEASE BE INFORMED – Kev McVeigh

What was more embarrassing was Lovell sticking his clay feet in his mouth and reciting from the Book of Genesis earlier in the flight. Not that he was alone in this. I remember squirming by the fireside.

I prefer ALIENS to ALIEN...the latter was, as some film review had it, just a Gothic castle flying in space. ALIENS had at least a few trappings of sf – and a marvellous cast.

Clive James has just done an effective squelch of Madonna in his FAME series. 'Self made' was I think the epithet (didn't video it, as my spares are still tied up with Xmas stuff). Madonna repels me – I think because she's too self-conscious. Others – Marilyn Monroe, for instance – may have been so but were intelligent enough not to show it.

THE ONE PER CENT FREE – Darroll Pardoe

RAEBNC

GALANTY No.8 – Derek Pickles

Very nice caption to the cartoon, otherwise RAEBNC

THE ARACHNO FILE – J.D. Rickett

I don't know if it's a factor of my own slight deafness (only really occurs in a crowd) but I also like Charades as played at your Boxing Day party. Tho' on my part this is confined to picking up the occasional 'Give Us A Clue' half-hours as TV'd from ITV and getting them on video.

RYCT me. Thanks for congrats. on finding the butterfly story, tho' I'm still not totally convinced...somewhere, years back, there was this yarn with a mound or maybe two mounds heaving slightly. The present story has only the piece I quoted in 'K' in that respect. Maybe, one day....

RYCT Sue. Unmitigated bores. Feeling that I'm in that category sometimes I thank you for the interest, and of course you're right. Strange people have interesting backgrounds. There's a fan who has persisted from about 1950 to date, never done anything very oustanding, not very good at communicating – and yet is by way of being an authority on G.A. Henty, the Victorian children's author. Has over 100 books by Henty, and even travelled to Scotland (the ultimate, Theo!), to photocopy a rare Henty from an Edinburgh library.

I don't wish to boast but I read your (3pt?) line at normal reading distance without glasses. All right, I do wish to boast. Who was it said all that reading will make your eyes go bad? Er – was it reading?

Marvellous contribution from one so sunk in gloom – you allege.

STRUTHIAN PERSPECTIVE – Theo Ross

'Comment Hook and I' very nice. But then, what other kinds are there?

A short scamper through the undergrowth and I come to Zeller. No, it grieves me to say so, but no reference book I've been able to find gives a clue, tho' I'm getting a fine knowledge of authors whose names begin with 'Z' (Zimmer, Zwicky, Zeeman, etc). And yet – and yet – in the dim and distant past I remember a library book with something like that. But it wasn't a book on chronology or scientific laws or anything so mundane; it was a book on memory. The author was citing great feats of memory and how they could be accomplished. As you will realise, I wasn't a star pupil. Hope someone is more useful than myself on this. Have you tried Martin Gardener?

The debate on the height of medieval men still leaves me unconvinced that they'd have to duck their heads every time they were indoors. As for your interesting bit on the clothyard shaft, etc., there seems to a bit of a logical gap between 'his full armspan' which is alleged to be his height, and the rest.

Six pages of closely typed Ross is marvellous and just too much on which to comment. Thanks, Theo.

TRAVELS IN HYPER-REALITY – Maureen Speller

Fascinating stuff, not the least being the remark that you haven't read Hamlet. Like your note in a previous TiH that you'd only just read Campbell this threw me into a bit of a tizzy, as I was 13 years old when I bought a complete Shakespeare for the princely sum of 2/6d – 2 week's pocket money. (12½p). On the other hand I've never seen a stage production, so no stone throwing. There are, of course, lots of commentaries on it if you want to check up on those lapses of logic.

But the whole zine was enjoyable; you have a remarkable facility for transferring your thoughts to paper. Am looking forward to Speller on fox-hunting.

A BRIDGE TOO FAR – Brian Stovold

Nice choice of picture heading.

Re. TV comedy, SURGICAL SPIRIT on ITV is quite good, mostly because of Nichola McAuliffe – much under-rated.

Your spacing is still a bit erratic – there are people around in fandom who can help; Dave Langford; Chuck Connor (who's an ex-PoE). How about publishing details of what you have?

The rest: RAEBNC

MS. SELENEOUS – Sue Thomason

Ah, I remember 'Desiderata' – daughter, who was then a teenager, had it on the bedroom wall. I didn't, in fact, know it was supposed to be some ancient ode. I just thought it was a good thing for a teenage daughter. But on the larger issue, I could just as easily turn your question around and say "Why do people turn their noses up at anything old-fashioned and worship at the shrine of the Here and Now?" The prevailing culture is the answer. When it was the World View of your leaders that the Past contained all that was good, starting with religious leaders, it behoved you to fall in line. Remember Galileo (or better, Bruno). It wasn't until the 18th. century that they had sufficient self-confidence to overthrow the ancestor worship (recent bedside reading has been Gibbon's Decline & Fall. If you detect – with a magnifying glass – any particularly sonorous phrases here, blame him).

Nowadays, except for followers of Lovejoy, I don't think mis-attribution means all that much – last large scale fake I heard of was Pildown Man and before that the forgeries of Thomas Wise in the '30s. But the disappointment of anyone who believes that they've read a real genuine native putting his soul to paper and later finds it a fake is easy enough to understand; first-hand knowledge is considered the best, tho' a sympathetic outsider may have a better balanced view.


[[SPACE FOR ARTWORK]]

Remember John's coude lion at Waterloo, SE1? Believe it or not, I found it had previously appeared in a fanzine, in this illo by the late great ATom.

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Vince Clarke's APAzines
Contents

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Notes and Queries
K1
K2
K3
K4
K5
K6
K7
K8
K9
K10
K11
K12
K13
K14
K15
K16
K17
K18
K19
K20
K21
K22
K23
K24
K25
K26
K27
K28
K29
K30
K31
K32
K33
K34
K35
K36
K37
K38
K39
K40
K41
K42
K43
K44
K45
K46
K47
K48
K49
K50
K51
K52
K53
K54
K55
K56
K57
K58 to K69
K70
Books About SF Continued
From K??
Vincentian 1
Vincentian 2
Vincentian 3