Publications

Back before the internet existed, long before email and web pages, science fiction and fantasy fans needed a way to communicate.  Some clubs published newsletters, on varying schedules, to share information about meetings, conventions, and other happenings.

In the years before fan fiction sites existed on the internet, art and stories were shared in fanzines.  Then as now, people loved to imagine the lives of their favorite characters from movies, TV shows, and books.  They wrote and published their stories in fanzines.  Fan artists illustrated these fanzines—and some of those artists went on to do very well with their art.

Publishing a newsletter in the 1970s was done entirely differently than any such publication today.  There were no word processors, no personal printers or scanners.  Some of the magazines were reproduced with mimeograph machines.  Others—usually published by people who had a bit more money to spend, or a subscriber base—painstakingly typed up newsletters on manual typewriters, literally cutting and pasting text and artwork onto mockups of magazine pages.  These were taken to the local copy shop and printed.  Fanzine publication was a work of love.

Julia Howarth hard at work typing up a fanzine, surrounded by “paper tribbles.”  1975, courtesy of Jim Rondeau.

Publications

Clavius began in 1974 as the newsletter for The Utah Society for Science Fiction.

The Communicator began in 1973 as a newsletter for S.T.A.R.*Provo and later served that purpose for S.T.A.R.**UTAH and Star Trek Intermountain.

Subspace Chatter was the newsletter for S.T.A.R.*Salt Lake.

The Transponder was a short newsletter that was published in the months between The Communicator when The Communicator went bi-monthly.

Warp 12 was the newsletter for S.T.A.R.*Ogden.