![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Jun. 12th, 2007 05:02 pmIn among the frustration of trying to transfer software from the dying disc to the new one without, if possible, having to buy it again, I thought I'd have a small crow. No, not to eat.
I have in my possession, as of the end of last week, a big thick hardback book, with a dark green cover and decorated endpapers. Strangely enough, the pages are blue and mimeographed, but boy are there a lot of them. I finally have my very own copy of WARHOON 28.
What is WARHOON 28, I hear you cry? Perpend. There once was a very famous fan, as Neil Innes never quite sang, and his name was Walt Willis. He was in many ways the precursor, if not the progenitor (at least not as far as I know) of our own Dave Langford (who he? Try here for enlightenment, if I have the link right.) He (Willis) was in a way the cause of the Transatlantic Fan Fund and by extension its many successors, and his writings were eagerly sought after throughout fanzine fandom. And in 1978 another fan called Richard Bergeron (I hope you're taking notes: there may be a quiz afterwards) published a special issue of his fanzine WARHOON containing most of Willis's output to date. So huge was this collection that it had to be hardbound, and so dedicated was Bergeron that he did a proper job of it. It's a beautiful thing.
But...old fanwriting? What on earth for? Well, Willis is a very good and very funny writer, despite his own protestations to the contrary, and he tells a good story. But more than that, this book is a window to a time even we oldsters can scarcely remember now, a time when the Gestetner mimeograph was the cutting edge of amateur publishing technology, when "Things To Come" was new in the cinema and (a little later) Quatermass was just being broadcast for the first time on that new-fangled television thing. A time when crossing the Atlantic was not something *anyone* did lightly, and five pounds would buy more books than you could read in a week, if only you had that much money. It really is another world, a strange world, and yet fans and fandom, though scarcer on the ground than they are now, seem not so far removed from the communities we know and mostly love. I was alive for most of this time, and it's a shock to read this and see how things changed while I was busy making other plans, and how they stayed the same.
I've wanted this book since I first heard of it, when I had occasional thoughts of being a fanzine fan myself. Now I have it, and that pleases me not a little.
I have in my possession, as of the end of last week, a big thick hardback book, with a dark green cover and decorated endpapers. Strangely enough, the pages are blue and mimeographed, but boy are there a lot of them. I finally have my very own copy of WARHOON 28.
What is WARHOON 28, I hear you cry? Perpend. There once was a very famous fan, as Neil Innes never quite sang, and his name was Walt Willis. He was in many ways the precursor, if not the progenitor (at least not as far as I know) of our own Dave Langford (who he? Try here for enlightenment, if I have the link right.) He (Willis) was in a way the cause of the Transatlantic Fan Fund and by extension its many successors, and his writings were eagerly sought after throughout fanzine fandom. And in 1978 another fan called Richard Bergeron (I hope you're taking notes: there may be a quiz afterwards) published a special issue of his fanzine WARHOON containing most of Willis's output to date. So huge was this collection that it had to be hardbound, and so dedicated was Bergeron that he did a proper job of it. It's a beautiful thing.
But...old fanwriting? What on earth for? Well, Willis is a very good and very funny writer, despite his own protestations to the contrary, and he tells a good story. But more than that, this book is a window to a time even we oldsters can scarcely remember now, a time when the Gestetner mimeograph was the cutting edge of amateur publishing technology, when "Things To Come" was new in the cinema and (a little later) Quatermass was just being broadcast for the first time on that new-fangled television thing. A time when crossing the Atlantic was not something *anyone* did lightly, and five pounds would buy more books than you could read in a week, if only you had that much money. It really is another world, a strange world, and yet fans and fandom, though scarcer on the ground than they are now, seem not so far removed from the communities we know and mostly love. I was alive for most of this time, and it's a shock to read this and see how things changed while I was busy making other plans, and how they stayed the same.
I've wanted this book since I first heard of it, when I had occasional thoughts of being a fanzine fan myself. Now I have it, and that pleases me not a little.