WHAT WAS THIS THING CALLED
MEMORY HOLE ?
YESTERDAY'S FANZINES FOR TODAY AND TOMORROW ?
Back
WHY was this Thing Called Memory Hole?
...back, back in time, to an earlier more innocent world...in
this instance to 2004, when I (Greg Pickersgill, my very own self)
wrote the following:-
The MEMORY HOLE project
began in
1994, with the simple idea of getting unwanted science fiction
fanzines away from people who didn't want them and putting them into the hands
of those that did. Pretty soon it dawned on me that I also had the opportunity
to do something else; using my own fanzine collection as a core I could build up
an archive collection that would be available for borrowing, copying, and
bibliographic/fanzinographic purposes. Since then things
progressed. In all directions. Sometimes at once. And, like the Universe itself
which sf fandom seeks to reflect, it all came to an end. Well, rather sooner
than the Universe generally (as far as we know...) but you get my drift, yeah?
This
all originally came about because of my realisation that far too many
fanzines have been irretrievably lost or thrown away; probably 75% of the
average fanzine's print-run vanishes one way or another - a lot when one
considers a typical fanzine's print-run would be 200-300 copies.
It's a damned
peculiar thing that sf-fans, almost to a person book and magazine collectors and
usually aghast at the idea of throwing away any book, especially a rare first
edition, often treat fanzines so cavalierly. Some suggest that this is because
fanzines are produced for Love rather than Money, given away rather than sold
(or if sold, usually at token - much less than cost - price), and thus don't have
the monetary 'value' of, say, a first-edition copy of THE DEATH GUARD by Philip
George Chadwick. This might be right, but is no excuse. Each fanzine, whatever
its individual merits (and some are genuinely brilliant, the best reading you'd
pick up all week, even though many simply devalue the paper they're
printed on) is a potentially rare first edition, and perhaps might be valued
more for that alone.
And that value, I submit, is not
and should not be financial - fanzines are produced for love, they are
genuine amateur - in the true sense - hand-made creations - and they represent the living culture and history of
sf fandom, and should always be passed on freely to anyone who wants genuinely
wants them. Early MH flyers carried the legend 'Dealing in Fanzines is Low and
for Worms' and to be honest we here at the Haverfordwest SF and Helmet Society
World Headquarters still think this,
even though we know otherwise rather sound chaps who sell fanzines in order to
feed their children and pension funds.
Time and experience have shown us, though, that hardly anyone else shared this
opinion. What few people there were who collected fanzines proved much happier
to pay money for them at conventions, auctions, or even on Ebay, than to actually ask us here whether we could give them for
nothing. Incomprehensible but true. So that little bit of moral authority was
thrown on the scrapheap and no more accusing fingers were pointed at bookdealers
trying to sell off the scrappy bits of paper that arrived along with the valuable
book collections acquired from dead or lost-interest sf collectors.
Well whatever, it was with those ideas in mind that Memory Hole was
begun. Initially the project had a great deal of success. But it all petered out gradually. As the years passed less
and less was donated for either the archive or redistribution, and less and less was requested. Horrifically the amount incoming
soon exceeded the outgoing, so a genuinely severe storage problem built up (literally,
in walls of fanzines). It eventually got to the point where our quite small
house no longer had the room for our own stuff as well as all the heaps of fanzines
that we were notionally holding in trust for Fandom at Large. It wasn't so much
the actual Core Collection that was a problem - though at almost 20,000 items
that takes up enough space in itself! - but the thousands of duplicates that
no-one wanted.
Eventually severe measures had to be taken. As much as possible
was passed on to other people, but large quantities of frankly less interesting
stuff just went to the local tip. (You should find some anecdotes about all
this elsewhere on this website.) And finally in early 2003 we took the decision
- possibly long overdue - to scrap the whole project due to lack of interest.
Oh, we're still fanzine fans and fanzine collectors here
at the Haverfordwest SF, Science, and Helmet Society. If you're an Old-Time
Fan, have ever been a fanzine reader but not a
collector, check in your shed (you'd be surprised...), your attic, under your
bed, the top of your wardrobe - see if there's anything you don't want (the
older the better!). We'd be delighted to get it - as long as it's Good Stuff
and not just another collection of crummy University group newsletters or local-apa junk. You know what I mean, the sort of stuff that even the people who originally
produced it wouldn't want to see again. We can certainly repay
any shipping charges as required -
there's always the chance a complete set of VAMPIRE will surface, after all.
The Good Part is, as mentioned above we still maintain
a permanent fanzine collection - the
PERMACOLLECTION. This began, based around my own personal collection,
when I realised that in the event of a disaster (fire, flood, meteorite)
occurring to the late Vince Clarke's home (then the site of the only other
established fanzine library in Britain) there would be no substantial collection
of fanzines left anywhere in Western Europe. So the idea of a 'Second
Foundation' seemed sensible verging on vital. Since Vince's death his collection
has passed into the hands of Rob Hansen wherein one assumes in the absence
of other information it remains safe. And there is now also a substantial collection
maintained by the Science Fiction Foundation at Liverpool University, and one
day the Permacollection, or at least a large part of it, may indeed
be transferred
to the SFF and the friendly hands of its Administrator, sf fan Andy Sawyer.
The Permacollection presently contains
16,080 fanzines (2,809 titles) covering the period from 1934
to July 2004. The collection has been logged on a Paradox database and
the current version of the fanzinographic catalog derived from that is on this website.
Greg Pickersgill
(A note from 2015:- The Permacollection still
exists, sort of. At least, all the British Isles fanzines are
still with me, and they represent a significant chunk of the printed-paper
fanzines produced in the British Isles between the beginning and
end of Fanzine Days. A lot of the Rest of the World material
has gone, passed on to what one hopes are happy homes, though I
suspect much has by now been returned to produce. I did my bit,
I can't it all. It doesn't matter anyway, all is history,
the moving wave of the present outpaces us all, what was once valued
is forgotten.)
-----
I don't often think of Darroll Pardoe, indeed when I do it's a
sort of accident, like pouring the hot water into your cup instead of the
teapot. The other day though I was rooting through some old fanzines and I
thought of something Pardoe told me many years ago. Apparently, and he swore
this was true, he not only threw away most of the fanzines he'd been sent, as
being of no more than one-time-only interest, but from the rest tore out and
kept only the bits that seemed to him, at the time, worth preserving. This
seemed unbelievable and weird at the time, and now, looking back on it, it seems
more so, plus frightening and actually socially irresponsible. You don't need a
terrific intellect to figure out why. A big run of a fanzine is a couple of
hundred - perhaps as much as five hundred copies in some cases. There are
probably more copies available at the time of issue than there are people who
want it, but that's not a situation that always pertains. Copies are lost,
vanish into collections, are discarded by people who have no true interest, are
junked by relatives when the receiving fan dies or even moves away from home.
That initial print run rapidly becomes a number of extant copies substantially
smaller than the number of people who want or ought to see them. When you have
`fans' like Pardoe, and probably dozens of others who casually discard or
deliberately destroy their accumulated fanzines it makes a bad situation worse.
I don't think there's any real qualitative difference between a
good fanzine and a first edition PK Dick or WS Burroughs or an Edward Hopper
painting or the last original print of METROPOLIS. All these things are precious
in and of themselves, never mind any artificial commercial value, which is,
unfortunately, all that most people can understand. A copy of EYE, GRUE,
SPECULATION or VOID has no perceptible value at all to anyone but a fanzine fan,
but to the one who wants it it is a rare treasure indeed. I feel anger, hurt and
frustration when I think of the classic fanzines that few of us will ever get to
see because there are no copies left in circulation, partly because people who
should have known better tore them up or dropped them casually in the trash.
I've occasionally given away, with a three-armed abandon I would
later regret, fanzines I no longer wanted or of which I had duplicate copies.
I've once or twice stood by and seen - as at one of the Yorcons in the Eighties
- large piles of old fanzines left neglected and apparently unwanted at the end
of conventions, probably to be thrown away by the hotel as trash, because no-one
on the committee knew what to do with them. And I feel guilty about that still,
ten years later. I have never, though, thrown away or otherwise destroyed
fanzines.
So what. Are all old fanzines good? No. Are all old fanzines
virtually irreplaceable first editions? Yes. Would fans, active and aspirant, be
improved by access to and the attentive reading of, the work of previous
generations of fandom. Certainly. My concept of fandom was radically informed by
getting hold of some - too few - of the best fanzines of the fifteen years prior
to my own involvement. They showed me that there was a background and culture to
work within, they demonstrated that some things worked and others didn't - and
even though that didn't stop me from hacking down a few trees it meant I didn't
have to go to the laborious effort of sawing them up and making something that
rolled, unsteadily and backwards. They showed me that continuity was important -
this was more a revelation at to me at seventeen than it would have been to
someone entering fandom older. Also, by seeing the differences as much as the
similarities, I readily grasped that there was no need to slavishly copy what
had gone before, but to use that body of thinking, attitude and ideas to
generate something that was of me and of my time. (That latter may not seem a
particularly wild idea to many, but there are people who seriously propose that
no heed whatever should be paid to fan-activities of the past and everything
should be reinvented afresh every few years. If you argued this should apply to
any other artform or science they'd be up all night contending it. I guess
that's what Fandom Is Just A Goddamn Hobby really means, at the death.
Actually what I regret is that I didn't get more old fanzines.
This is partly due to the fractured structure of British fandom in the
middle-to-late Sixties; most of the `established' fans when I came in had
actually been on the scene barely five or so years themselves, a large number of
them less than that, and few had any particular interest in or access to
collections of older - pre 1964 - material. There was little or no reference to
or discussion of anything other than the present or the immediate past. Good
lord, old time fans in 1969 meant Peter Weston, for god's sake, who'd been
active since the dim recesses of the past - 1964. Not that I helped much; when I
started the situation was so weak and insipid - all those dull PaDszines, Mary
Reed and OXO fandom, happy-days-toytown fandom - that there seemed no other
course than to draw a line and start again. In doing that the thread of
continuity was buried if not broken.That meant that startlingly few fans in the
following decade and a half were even so much as aware of, never mind sought out
or actually read anything published before, say, 1968. OK. I can hear the
restlessness from here; Get to the point, already, before you start trying to
make a case that even the Sixties fans showed no awareness of Fifties fandom
(arguably true, at least from 1965 on) or that Fifties fans never saw a copy of
NOVAE TERRAE; You can stretch this a bit far, says the Body of Fandom. Alright
alright.
Well I was wondering, as you do, between planning my huge
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF BRITISH FANDOM (I'm up to C already. Clarke, Joy. No not that
one, the one who did the really terrible fanzine in Manchester or somewhere;
anyone remember? Bloody big problem these Encyclopedias, wait 'til I get to W),
and compiling an Index to my monograph HANSEN - THE MARRIED YEARS, anyway, I was
wondering, why not collect old unwanted fanzines. And give them away again. Like
a sort of Salvation Army of the fannish mind. It all made a sort of sense. I'd
make the populace in general aware that I would take their unwanted fanzines,
sort them, issue simple lists on a regular basis, and anyone could have on a
first come basis anything they wanted for their own collections or whatever. So
wrote to my friend and advisor Vince Clarke who said:
"A clearing house for old fanzines. Not many people collecting
these days, and even some of those who have sizeable collections - like Keith
Walker, Howard Rosenblum, or Brian Burgess - are just sitting on them. Peter
Roberts has given up, so presumably has Harry Bond. Ken Bulmer has a lot, merely
because he can't get up the energy to sort them out. Current collectors are
Connor, Hansen, self, - damned if I know any more. So I don't think there'd be
any takers for your scheme."
Which might be true and all that, as far as the right now goes.
What I'm afraid of is that there's not much duty now for the future going on. If
it's hard verging on the impossible to get twenty-year old fanzines Now what's
the situation regarding Now going to be like in that scifi year of 2018. I can
see a lot of this stuff just sliding down some landfill somewhere between now
and then. So I'm going to give it a go anyway. Here's my plan. If you or anyone
you know who is now or has ever been a fan has any quantity of fanzines that you
don't want, ship them to me, address as inside front cover. I will sort them,
and issue a list, probably bi-annually, available on demand, giving an outline
of what's in stock. All fanzines will be available free on a first come first
served basis, though postage will be charged at cost. A portion of multiple
copies will be available for Fanfundraising in the case of the more famous
items, and other overstocks will be assembled as representative bundles again
available on demand. I am prepared to repay the costs of shipping fanzines to me
whenever necessary. It could cost you nothing other than a little time to
contribute your unwanted fanzines to this scheme, which I might as well call
MEMORY HOLE. What I'll get out of it is satisfaction that I'm doing something
that while it may seem futile today may have some long term benefit. Oh, OK and
maybe a few fanzines for my own collection. This is not a joke; I know it sounds
a bit crazy but I think it's a worthwhile idea. I'm willing to be proved wrong
but I'll at least know I tried. MEMORY HOLE should be looked at as a supplement
to Vince Clarke's Fanzine Library, and indeed a first priority would be to
ensure gaps there are filled. I am able to do what Vince can't, though, (I've
got the time and space and he hasn't) and set up a collection and redistribution
service that might, with co-operation, be of benefit to all fanzine fans, now
and forever.
(With the benefit of hindsight from the scientifictional
future days
of the 21st century I can safely say,
Good grief what a complete fantasist !)
Greg
Pickersgill/Memory Hole
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