fanmag n.

Fan Mags May Lose Studio Standing

He had just finished researching into the perfumes-stars-use request from a high brow fan mag.

There have been such numbers of those fan mags, as they are called, published in the last few years—the majority mimeographed and hectographed, and some few printed—that it is hard to keep track of them.

Fan Mag Reviews are out. Or, rather, never were to be‘in’. There is so little space left over, Weisinger explaind [sic]…& the mag is edited on such a close margin…that the chance of a ‘Fan Mag Review’ feature is quite impossible.

Where, oh where, is ‘Futuria Fantasia’, the California entry into the ‘contemplated fan mags’ derby?

Don’t publish serious fan-feud letters! Let the fan-mags handle those, if we must have them, although why we should, I can’t imagine.

LeZ plans, in the future, to print these Cullings regularly, from foreign fanmags, or American mags of small circulation, in the belief that you might otherwise not see the material.

By this time, of course, what with writings to editors and reading fan-mags and writing to authors and writing fan-mags, the fan has absolutely no time left to read any more pro magazines. [Ibid. 162/2] He no longer finds time to read even the fan mags; of course, he gets very few of these because his feuds have cut him off the mailing lists.

The advertising value of fanzines to promags is negligible, for the simple reason that anyone in sufficient contact with STF to read fanmags knows all about the prozines.

Or suppose you chance to belong to a very large, very old organization called The National Fantasy Fan Federation. The name itself has been abbreviated down to ‘the NFFF’ or ‘the N3F.’ You are referred to as a Neffer. If you publish a fanmag distributed to members only, it’s a Neffzine.

Eventually there was enough correspondence and written matter flying around to create a whole new world of amateur publications, news-letters, fan-journals, and fan-mags. The end result of all this was that the professional people and the fans had moved closer together, and now the fans that originally wrote just letters in to the pro-magazines were themselves contributing material for publication. It is this camaraderie of communication that holds as the basis for the birth and development of fanzines.

Traveling and meeting were not always easy for these men of limited holiday time and means. Their main social forum was virtual—on paper—the fanmags that they wrote, produced, and circulated among themselves. The first major British fanmag, Novae Terrae, was launched in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, in 1936; only in the following year did its editors meet up with other fans from around the country—at a meeting hosted by the Leeds chapter of the American Science Fiction League (SFL).