 |
 Presents:
|
Page 1 of 'A Short History of Baltimore Fandom' © Jack Chalker, used in perpetuity by permission of his wife Eva | ||||
 | ||||
 I discovered science fiction fandom in 1957,
when I wrote to an Alabama fan named Billy Joe
Plott who had bragged about his 'magazine' Mael-
strom in the letter column of a science fiction comic
book. I was not even thirteen years old at the time.
Soon afterwards I began writing for Maelstrom, and
a bit later for other fanzines across the country.
Fanzines were my first real form of fanac.
Even then, I was already an avid reader of science
fiction. About that same time, I had answered
an ad in the back of an issue of F&SF from The
Werewolf Bookshop in Verona, Pennsylvania. It
was really just a book remainder house; you sent
them money and they sent back lots of books, you
didn't get to pick which ones. Most of the ones I
received were worthless or uninteresting in the
extreme, but one title I got startled me by its look
and feel, and by its general production value. It
was The Throne of Saturn, by S. Fowler Wright,
published by a company about which I knew nothing:
Arkham House. So I wrote to their address and
asked for information on other titles, and in a very
short time I was in almost weekly correspondence
with August Derleth.I'd also discovered another operation that advertised in
Astounding, Pick-A-Book of Hicksville,
New York. This proved to be the Gnome Press
attempt to compete with the SF Book Club and,
somehow, I wound up corresponding like mad with
Marty Greenberg. Thanks to both of these men I
got a real grounding in the business side of science
fiction and fantasy, a lot of advice, and, in the case
of Derleth, an opening of correspondence with
other famous folks like Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber,
and Clark Ashton Smith.I did my first fanzine in 1960, a very primitive
affair called Centaur. It was basically of the then-popular
faanish sort, and was done with my neighbor and good friend Harry Brashear, who was on
the fringes of fandom but was a pretty good spot
artist. He drew the cover and managed to trace a
lot of the submitted artwork from well known fan
artists of the time on standard mimeo stencils using
a kitchen fork.The problem was, of course, I had no money to
produce it and no means, either. Harry solved this
by having us walk into nearby Forest Park High
School (the template, by the way, for Rydell High
in Grease), go into the printing room, and run off
about fifty copies of Centaur using the school's
mimeograph and mimeo paper. Not a really shocking thing,
except, of course, that I didn't attend
Forest Park High. Instead, at that time I was going
to Baltimore City College, which was a high school
that also had a first-year junior college. Baltimore
City was a very old school, third oldest in the
United States, and it was housed in a massive stone
castle-like building on a large campus. It also at the | ||||
|
| |||||
The Baltimore Science Fiction Society, Inc.
|
all maintenance is performed by: "webmeister at bsfs dot org" using 
ArachnophiliaBSFS Banner by Ed Edman Version HH-13 - 08/06/2017 | ||||
 |
 | ||||
World Science Fiction Society, an unincorporated literary association. "Balticon" is a service mark of the Baltimore Science Fiction Society, Inc. | |||||
