apaholic

[calimac]

irontongue has an interesting post about communication, but what caught me about it was that she begins by discussing amateur press associations, or apas, communities in print within the context of science fiction fandom, that had a lot in common with the online bulletin boards and other communities that succeeded and have in practice supplanted them - except that the exchange of conversation was a lot slower.

I belonged to several apas in my time, and as many as five at once in the 1980s. But I gradually cut back, and my last apa called it a day after its OE died in 2006. The problem is that I've always liked apas best as close communities of friends, and they could spoil or go sour, and other apas I might have joined didn't appeal to me for the amount of emotional effort it would take to integrate into that community. (This is also why I never joined the Well.) The interactive side of my desire for apas is being reasonably met in blog and LJ comments, and the expository side is actually being met better in LJ, because what I always really wanted was an incentive to keep a kind of public diary, and writing for an apa about "what I've been doing since the last deadline" was only a vague approximation of this.

The post says, "APAs originated in science fiction fandom a long time ago (the 40s? 50s?)." They didn't start in fandom. The original apas (known in fandom as "the mundane apas") were founded in the late 19th century by home-printing hobbyists. They'd print N copies of little magazines, and send them off to a central mailer, who'd distribute bundles of copies of each to all the members. The idea was that it was a cheap way to keep a mailing list, and the point was to display your printing skills rather than whatever the intellectual content was (and it wasn't necessarily written by the person who printed it). The mailings were not bound together - they were just bundles of little magazines in an envelope - and there was no interaction between the individual magazines.

H.P. Lovecraft was such a hobbyist, but apas met fandom when some fans, including Donald Wollheim, later a well-known editor, joined some apas in the mid 30s, and invented mailing comments - they'd write their responses to the material in the previous mailing. This was revolutionary. They founded their own fannish apa in 1937: it was called the Fantasy Amateur Press Association ("fantasy" was considered something of a synonym for "science fiction" in those days) or FAPA, and it's still around, though hobbling. Like the mundane apas, its mailings are unbound, and some of them, also as in mundane apas, are full-scale fanzines with contributions by others than the editor.

A few of the other older apas are similar in nature. I'm not sure when the custom began in newer fannish apas of stapling the contents together, and of the individual contributions being just personal natterings and comments by the typist that don't really stand alone outside of the apa context, and of printing being of no other than practical interest, but these customs were already well-established by the time I started joining apas in the mid-70s, which was something of the heyday of fannish apas. But the relics of the history remain in the custom of calling those individual contributions "zines" and in the custom of giving them individual titles as if they were still fanzines on their own. Every once in a while one encounters people who get the terminology wrong, using "apa" as the term for the individual contribution rather than the entity as a whole, or "zine" for the mailing instead of the individual contribution. This annoys me on the same level as misusing "crescendo" or writing allusions to "lions and tigers and bears, oh my" that don't scan properly.

In their day, I found apas handy to read on the bus or during breaks at work, both because they permitted short, disjointed patches of reading (being written in a short, disjointed, patchy way), and because they were handy to ward off unwanted conversation by the sort of people who thought reading was only something to do if there was nobody to converse with. Asked "What are you reading?" I would reply, "an apa," and when asked the expected follow-up, "What's an apa?" I would reply, "this is," and that was usually the conversation-stopper it was intended to be.

Comments

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

Ray Bink!

[Though I must ruin the perfection of that by mentioning the co-worker who asked me what WARHOON #28 was, and when I told her, she gave me a look and said I sure read weird things.]

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Yes, I've read Lovecraft's essay on amateur press associations, in which, among other things, he forecast major changes in the hobby from the technological innovation of the mimeograph (I believe it was the mimeograph; the technological dates seem plausible). Having myself lived through the transition from mimeography to xerography, I have some vague sense of what he was seeing.

[barondave.livejournal.com]

The fanzine panel at this year's Minicon brought up some of these points (about apas being an early form of social network, and how sf fandom developed ((but not necessarily invented)) many of the techniques in use today), and we had ditto! I couldn't find any of my hecto zines, which is just as well.

To sum up at least some of the discussion: We humans are social creatures, and will use whatever communication technology is available. But fans are also geeks and the craft of producing a well-printed zine in whatever medium is available is fun, and may lead to egoboo.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I can't find my old hecto zines because the hecto printing has softly and suddenly vanished away from the paper.

[holyoutlaw.livejournal.com]

I have a couple ditto zines from the late 70s-early 80s that still have some printing on them.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

I don't think I'd ever heard the history of how APAs entered fandom before, so thanks for that.

I belonged to a couple of APAs over the years, but I never found it a comfortable format for me, probably because in a way it was *too* intimate. The semi-public nature of LJ works a lot better for me. (I also used to keep a private journal for years, but I'd abandoned that long before I started writing on LJ.)

[nellorat.livejournal.com]

Arguably "apas" did begin with FAPA, since earlier amateur journalism groups were called "ajays." Everything you say seems right, but it depends on where you draw the line terminologically.

Also, the ajays did have some commenting, but it was by the OE in the OO. FAPA's contribution was to make it something everyone did. I also get the feeling that the OE comments were more snarky reviews than personal exchanges.

I always thought it was ironic that Jack Speer was one of the fathers of the mc & yet his were so trivial, often boring.

I'll check into that discussion.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

You're correct about the terminology, but don't confuse the word with the thing. New York City was founded in the 1620s, not in 1664. I left out that detail, and a great many others, on purpose because I was writing a blog post, not a comprehensive treatise.

[orangemike.livejournal.com]

MilwApa's collation was this afternoon, so I was delighted to read this little reprise. We're up to our 331st monthly mailing (although almost none of them are mailed any more). Our youngest active member is 16 (parkingprincess and my daughter Kelly); the oldest is in her 60s or early 70s, I believe.

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

Belated public thanks for this; I've snuck an update into my blog posting.