Is that real? A real thing?

Totally real. They're trying to preserve the history of K/S slash, which is a pretty historic thing in fandom.

And sorry, didn't mean to turn the thread into Fanfic 101.

Dana, I'm nearly speechless with bliss. What a cool idea.

There still might be a place to donate it (and I'm totally not chasing after you, yelling, "preserve the history of fandom!" By all means, auction it off if you like). If you want me to poke around, I can ask Killa.

Thing is, I feel obliged to auction it off somehow, because it was donated to SaveFarscape by an Aussie fan for that purpose. On the other hand, it's such a treasure trove that the best place for it is some sort of cultural history museum or something. I'm a bit boggled about what to do with it.

And yeah, I have a collection of Trek zines that I need to auction off. Gotta figure out how to do that. I look at it as a sociological curiosity more than anything else, since the collection goes all the way back to the first ever Trek zine, produced in 1969. 35 years of fannish history, all in one box; pretty damned cool.

Wow. Maybe you could hold on to that until I get a book deal to document the history of fanfic, and line you, Dana, Shrift and Nutty up as contributing editors.

Does anyone know anything about the new science fiction museum in Seattle? Are they interested in fannish things? I have some sf fanzines from the '70s that I hate to just toss, but I'm in a major deaccessioning mode.

line you, Dana, Shrift and Nutty up as contributing editors

Don't forget Theodosia, who's certainly got a longer fannish pedigree than I do.

But don't dangle that prospect in front of me unless you go through with it! It's far too tempting a project.

Here's a great place that collects SF books (founded by the donation of Judith Merril's collection, originally called The Spaced-Out Library. The world was a more happening place, then.)

Merril Collection

Does anyone know anything about the new science fiction museum in Seattle? Are they interested in fannish things? I have some sf fanzines from the '70s that I hate to just toss, but I'm in a major deaccessioning mode.

What sort? I could see if I can find out.

Plei, I'd have to go back and pull the box out for the fanzines, but I can let you know when I do. I also have things like programs for cons in the '70s and early '80s, including the hardcover program for Midamericon and all the stuff we did for the '78 DeepSouthCon. There are also all of our Heritage Press stuff, which is mostly comic-art oriented, but there is some sf and fantasy oriented stuff like the limited edition of Thomas Burnett Swann's Queen's Walk in the Dust with the Jeff Jones plates hand-tipped-in by these very fingers and the Who Was That Monolith I Saw You With? book. I'm going to sell some of this stuff, but some of it seems like part of history. I could compile it all and send off an e-mail to the acquisitions e-mail address, but I kind of wanted a sense of whether it was worth the effort to do that.

I was going to say, the other place I can think of it belonging is the Popular Culture graduate department at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. they've got archives of all manner of oddities, including radio files from the 30s and 40s. I don't know if they'd buy, but they're the sort of repository that would keep and love and index and cross-reference.

I was in the British Library on Saturday and thought to myself, Self, there is a reason why you keep old books "just in case". It is because you avowedly can't be arsed to learn and know everything, but you live in the faith that someone will come along who will want to learn and know the contents of these books, and if you don't save them, maybe nobody will. (I suddenly remembered an article in the Times Sunday Magazine about time capsules, and how you could possibly plan ahead to keep a time capsule safe and protected for 1000 years. The most plausible solution the writers could come up with: make the capsule the sacred relic of a religious order.) I can't actually read the Lindisfarne gospels, but it pleases me to know they exist so that somebody can.

This is why I own an English-translation Inferno from 1928 and an extremely old Latin grammar, both most recently used by my great-grandfather, who died when I was probably 6 years old.