prozine n.

In exchange I am willing to send you any British stuff, reprints of two American prozines, Britain’s one and only sfn. pro mag., fanzines or whatever you want that I can lay my hands on.

Meanwhile, we continue to urge you to adopt a fan in service and keep him supplied with prozines. Personally, we’ve adopted Dan Wade & have been sending a batch of prozines to Hawaii weekly.

Completist, a dope who tries to have a complete collection in some line. The line may be as broad as having all the prozines ever published, or as narrow as collecting all the Golden Atom tales or all official correspondence during ones incumbency in some office.

Prozines have multiplied from the old days of the Big Three to a peak in 1939.

We, the rabid fen, are also a good writer’s best press agents with our little fanzines and their free advertising to those people who buy STF mags. Do not underestimate fandom, Mister Hall. His idea that rabid fans are (a) few and (b) monopolizing the Vizi is also false. You may have noticed that those few rabid fans change often. Old fen get tired of writing (but not of reading—such a thing is unheard of) and new fen take their places. The letter I won the prize for was the first I had ever written to a prozine. Ray Ramsay, in the Summer ish, was a regular reader, but that was his first letter.

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.

Fanzines are, as their name implies, magazines put out by fans. Such professional publications as Amazing and Fantastic are known as ‘prozines’.

Lettercol — A letter column. One of the favorite haunts of the actifans. Many fanzines have them, but in prozines they are practically standard equipment. A prozine without a letter column is a fakezine, and no trufan will buy one.

Feuds, the National Fantasy Fan Federation, letters to the prozines, mimeo ink under the fingernails, dreams of the Hugo while high on corflu (which you actually have gotten, at last, old superfan), articles typed straight on stencils, frightful poems and worse fannish imitation pro fiction, costumes at cons and musical beds, hateful monster movies that we just can’t resist, Seventh Fandom, talking philosophy all night in greasy spoons, and that whole wild scene.

These magazines are sources for communication, and if a reader is willing to deal with the quirks of the editor or some of the writers, one can often get more useful material from a semi-promagazine than from a prozine like White Dwarf, and for a lower price.

‘Fanzine or prozine?’ Ted asked me on that first evening, when I said that I had published.

Maybe I should wait until that stopped happening before going back to the prozines.