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More from Saara
Time to post a few of the newly scanned pieces from the 1980's.
This began as a simple drawing of a couple of stuffed toys representing my characters, but gradually grew. Most of the toys, records, and books are real favourties of mine. Notice the Matchbox Toy, the plastic dinosaur, the skateboard, the "hockey" coin, the model pistol, and silly putty. But no everything is quite as real as it looks. The Airfix series of 1/35 plastic soldiers never included a Viet Cong set. The two model boxes are also made up. There never was a P-70 Sidewinder fighter, nor of course a model of Saara Mar's spaceship.
This began as a simple drawing of a couple of stuffed toys representing my characters, but gradually grew. Most of the toys, records, and books are real favourties of mine. Notice the Matchbox Toy, the plastic dinosaur, the skateboard, the "hockey" coin, the model pistol, and silly putty. But no everything is quite as real as it looks. The Airfix series of 1/35 plastic soldiers never included a Viet Cong set. The two model boxes are also made up. There never was a P-70 Sidewinder fighter, nor of course a model of Saara Mar's spaceship.
Category All / All
Species Unspecified / Any
Size 400 x 529px
File Size 118.9 kB
You can find packaging like that in a lot of the more "adult" toys such as models and stuff like that, but today's toys are more often put in packages with many windows and bright graphics. No better nor worse than the toys of yesterday, no matter how much our rose colored glasses may say otherwise.
I only said Airfix never made 'em. This was before hard plastic soldiers you assembled and painted, made by model companies like Tamiya and Italeri. Airfixe's were one piece and soft plastic, which made them nearly indestructable, but not suitable for painting whatever they said. I must have a doze or fifteen boxes of different Airfix soldiers, the oddest being the medieval knights (12t. to 15th. century).
Actually, there were a couple of sources for hard plastics back then, but they tended to be hard to find, other than the ones Roco made. Painting the soft plastics was easy - keeping the paint on them was hard, but I still have a few that have survived roughly 40 years with the paint on them.
Ha ha... no, actually its a copy of a book called All Our Yesterdays that I think might be older than the TV show. It was written by Harry Warner Jr. and covers the history of sience fiction fandom from the earliest days (in the 20's to about 1950). It was publiished by a small press outfit and has been kept in continuous print to the present day, I think. It's an indespensible source of fan history, though there are some significant errors and ommisions. There was a follow-up of the 50's, called A Wealth of Fable, published in the 1980's. No such generalized histories of SF fandom exist for later decades because, as Warner himself said, fandom grew too large for any individual to know much about every corner of it.
Harry Warner was a fan himself, as well as a newspaper journalist. He wrote zillions of letters to fanzines over three decades, and made himself a must on ever faned's mailing list. Few people met him though, since he never went to cons or ever seemed to leave his home in Hagerstown PA. A few people managed to visit him at home, though. I include msyelf on that list. He had an immense collection of fanzines which was hoped would go to a university or library after his death two or three years ago. Unfortunately he left everything his friggin' church, who took one look at the incomprehensible scribblings of sinners, anarchist, marxists, humanists and Jews and sold it to the first dealer who offered them cash.
Anyway... that's what that is.
Harry Warner was a fan himself, as well as a newspaper journalist. He wrote zillions of letters to fanzines over three decades, and made himself a must on ever faned's mailing list. Few people met him though, since he never went to cons or ever seemed to leave his home in Hagerstown PA. A few people managed to visit him at home, though. I include msyelf on that list. He had an immense collection of fanzines which was hoped would go to a university or library after his death two or three years ago. Unfortunately he left everything his friggin' church, who took one look at the incomprehensible scribblings of sinners, anarchist, marxists, humanists and Jews and sold it to the first dealer who offered them cash.
Anyway... that's what that is.
Cool! Thanks for the detailed info. I understand what Warner meant about the fandom growing too large to catalog. Any printed history of SF is obsolete by the time it leaves the print shop.
Too bad about his fanzine collection. If it weren't for the "incomprehensible scribblings of sinners, anarchists, marxists, humanists and Jews," our world would be considerably less interesting. :) Any idea where it finally wound up, or do you think it just got scattered to the four winds of eBay?
Too bad about his fanzine collection. If it weren't for the "incomprehensible scribblings of sinners, anarchists, marxists, humanists and Jews," our world would be considerably less interesting. :) Any idea where it finally wound up, or do you think it just got scattered to the four winds of eBay?
Probably the later, as the dealer sold off the collection. The pity of it is that fanzine collctions get broken up because there are people who collect fanzines as fanzines, (who don't usually have deep pockets), and people who only collect fanzines that have Harlan Elllion or H.P. Lovecraft in them. Many rare zines from the early days disappear from the hand of fanzine fandom and end up in the collections of people only interested in this or that writer, dark fantasy, or pulp fiction. I guess that's legit too, but...
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