Saturday, August 17, 2013

Other People's Collections part 3

Hilda

A link to the collection of Les Toil of "Hilda" drawings by Duane Bryers.  Some amazing old school pin-up work, and some fantastic pieces in his collection.

Sunday, August 4, 2013

Other Peoples' Collections part 2

This next piece I found a couple of days ago in a science fiction/fantasy zine called Lighthouse.  You'll notice that the fourth name down on the left side is a recognizable one, and this is indeed a flyer for the infamous march during which Dr. King made his "I Have A Dream" speech.  When I found this, it struck me that this was an incredibly important piece of history.  I wonder how many of these flyers have been preserved is such condition?  At the top of the page you'll notice a typewritten line that reads "Just before the convention--."  This is in reference to Discon I, the World Science Fiction Convention, that was held in Washington D.C.on August 31 - September 2, 1963.  Perhaps a few of the zine writers would have been in the city early, and would have witnessed this historic occasion.  It is also of interest to me that this flyer was distributed in an amateur press mailing.  The typewritten information at the bottom ("FAPA 104 . August, 1963 . Pete Graham") indicates that the flyer was included in the 104th zine mailing of the Fantasy Amateur Press Association, collated by Pete Graham., in August of that year.  This, along with the remarkable amount of female contributors to these zines, paints a very different picture of fandom in the early sixties to the despicably misogynistic one of the present day.  So, for your enjoyment, edification, whatever, the flyer for the March on Washington:

As with the Roger Ebert poem, this is not necessarily the sort of thing one might expect to find in a collection of sci-fi and fantasy zines.  What this might force us to consider is what we include in a collection.  The typewritten lines clearly mark this for inclusion in the FAPA mailing, but the content of the flyer is not oriented toward the content of the amateur press.  We could consider inclusion by completeness.  We could also perhaps consider inclusion by philosophy.  Science Fiction has long been associated with better worlds, and the March on Washington was certainly about that.  There is also the perspective of inclusion by accident.  The flyer was within the collection, and has been for 50 years, so is an intrinsic part of the collection.  But perhaps the perspective on the collection itself needs to be reconfigured from being a collection of amateur press zines to being a snapshot, or an archive, of social and cultural practices and attitudes from this era.